Arms and the Women
Arms and the Women
Reginald Hill
‘Luminously written, thrilling, unexpectedly erudite, and beautifully structured’ Geoffrey Wansell, Daily MailWhen Ellie Pascoe finds herself under threat, her husband DCI Peter Pascoe and Superintendent Andy Dalziel assume it’s because she’s married to a cop.While they hunt down the source of the danger, Ellie heads out of town in search of a haven… only to get tangled up in a conspiracy involving Irish arms, Colombian drugs and men who will stop at nothing to achieve their ends.Dalziel eventually concludes the security services are involved, but by then it is too late. Ellie’s on her own – and must dig deep down into her reserves to survive…
REGINALD HILL
ARMS AND THE WOMEN
A Dalziel and Pascoe novel
Copyright (#ulink_62262ab0-e763-558b-9777-3a07454d1c9e)
Harper An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2000
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
Copyright © Reginald Hill 2000
Extract from ‘Marina’ from the Collected Poems 1909–62 by T.S. Eliot (published by Faber and Faber Ltd) Reproduced by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd
Lines from ‘Girls’ by Stevie Smith from The Collected Poems of Stevie Smith (Penguin) © James McGibbon 1975
Extracts from The Englishman’s Flora by Geoffrey Grigson (Phoenix House 1987)
Extract from A Celtic Miscellany by Kenneth Hurlstone Jackson (Penguin 1971)
Reginald Hill asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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Source ISBN: 9780007313181
Ebook Edition © JULY 2015 ISBN: 9780007378548
Version: 2015-06-18
Dedication (#ulink_7abede52-2ed6-5caf-96b7-48c4ae4fa188)
This one’s for
those Six Proud Walkers
in whose company the sun always shines bright
Emmelien
Jane
Liz
Margaret
Mary
Teresa
who most Fridays of the year…on distant hills
Gliding apace, with shadows in their train,
Might, with small help from fancy, be transformed
Into fleet Oreads sporting visibly…
and, of course, laughing and talking and eating
almond slices,
with fondest greetings from
one of the trailing shadows!
Epigraph (#ulink_fd336c42-64a9-5288-bead-3e2922bc78d3)
What song the Syrens sang, or what name Achilles assumed when he hid himself among women, though puzzling Questions, are not beyond all conjecture.
SIR THOMAS BROWNE: Urn Burial
With my own eyes I’ve seen the Sibyl at Cumae hanging in a pot, and when the young lads asked her, what do you want for yourself, Sibyl? she replied, I want to die.
PETRONIUS: The Satyricon
Girls! although I am a woman
I always try to appear human
STEVIE SMITH: Girls!
Contents
Cover Page (#u2f6ceb49-4ff5-5067-87bc-fae8a36833db)
Title Page (#u31ed8494-9bfa-5d58-adc5-6b9d991ade21)
Copyright (#uc08b19f4-b35d-57e8-848b-c0d8ba163db4)
Dedication (#u597a5e52-8b21-5f31-9744-1169d41af957)
Epigraph (#ue6150805-54e2-562b-8669-7d8cdb38ce61)
PROLEGOMENA (#u29229597-eaaa-573a-98af-b715fe13ca77)
BOOK ONE (#uc0d975a5-2f9f-5a48-9cc5-aa26ff7c8fe5)
i spelt from Sibyl’s leaves (#uec1a6971-4043-55eb-854e-15f082e21962)
ii who’s that knocking at my door? (#ubfda9bdf-10b7-5733-8068-1a6d1192ebe7)
iii memories are made of this (#uba2d8726-4604-54d8-93af-db180a744cd3)
iv spelt from Sibyl’s leaves (#u9f4c0437-0ad8-5fbe-b11d-cb9254f57ff7)
v revenge and retribution (#u22a2d5c5-bbbe-5263-8792-4dbcced69961)
vi citizen’s arrest (#ud99b14d7-6460-5b9b-9242-c00a52748179)
vii a pint of guinness (#ub5ea5ac6-d579-5558-8adc-624f3b8e901b)
viii spelt from Sibyl’s leaves (#uf8a18fdd-6552-5d01-8642-eb1de9e13aef)
ix bag lady on a bike (#u100aa0a6-6ac3-5d0f-884c-8797ec1ab551)
x spelt from Sibyl’s leaves (#ub67ff668-7b3a-55cb-969b-d643b2dff8c7)
xi a game of hearts (#litres_trial_promo)
xii doppelgänger (#litres_trial_promo)
xiii the death of Marat (#litres_trial_promo)
xiv a man’s best friend (#litres_trial_promo)
xv spelt from Sibyl’s leaves (#litres_trial_promo)
xvi oats for St Uncumber (#litres_trial_promo)
xvii the juice of strawberries (#litres_trial_promo)
xviii the flowers that bloom in the spring, tra-la! (#litres_trial_promo)
xix pooh on the patio (#litres_trial_promo)
xx the last of the cobblers (#litres_trial_promo)
BOOK TWO (#litres_trial_promo)
i strange encounter (#litres_trial_promo)
ii drudgery divine (#litres_trial_promo)
iii the pavilion by the sea (#litres_trial_promo)
iv spelt from Sibyl’s leaves (#litres_trial_promo)
v realms of gold (#litres_trial_promo)
vi cheated by Protestants (#litres_trial_promo)
vii the sirens’ song (#litres_trial_promo)
viii we galloped all three (#litres_trial_promo)
ix coitus interruptus (#litres_trial_promo)
x belly or bollocks (#litres_trial_promo)
xi spelt from Sibyl’s leaves (#litres_trial_promo)
xii come to dust (#litres_trial_promo)
xiii faery lands forlorn (#litres_trial_promo)
xiv a face from the past (#litres_trial_promo)
xv bloody glass (#litres_trial_promo)
xvi a palomino pony (#litres_trial_promo)
xvii a formal complaint (#litres_trial_promo)
xviii the US cavalry (#litres_trial_promo)
xix I shall wound every man (#litres_trial_promo)
xx liberata liberata (#litres_trial_promo)
xxi an elfin storm (#litres_trial_promo)
xxii spelt from Sibyl’s leaves (#litres_trial_promo)
EPILEGOMENA (#litres_trial_promo)
Keep Reading (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
By Reginald Hill (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
PROLEGOMENA (#ulink_90e0b586-a353-5f46-ba19-8497cda3351a)
When I go to see my father, he doesn’t know me.
He’s away somewhere else in a strange land.
I tell myself it’s not all bad. He missed all that suffering when we thought Rosie was going to die. And all those refugees in Africa, and in Europe too, that we see streaming across our television screens, he doesn’t have to worry about them. Global warming, AIDS, the Euro, none of these impinges on his consciousness. He doesn’t even have to feel anxious about his roses when gales are forecast in July.
He sits here in the Home, like ignorance on a monument, smiling at nothing.
At least he’s content, the nurses tell us, and we tell them back, yes, at least he’s content.
Content to be nobody and nowhere.
But I have seen him outside of this room, this cocoon, with memories of somebody and somewhere still intermittent in his mind, staring in bewilderment at the woman who is both his wife and a complete stranger, pausing in the hallway of his own house, unable to recall if he’s heading for the kitchen or the garden and ignorant of which door to use if he does remember, crying out in terror as the dog which has been his most obedient servant for nearly ten years comes bounding towards him, barking its love.
Seeing him like this was bad.
But worse was waking in the night during and after Rosie’s illness, wondering if perhaps what we call Alzheimer’s – that condition in which the world becomes a vortex of fragments, a video loop of disconnected scenes, an absurdist drama full of actors pretending to be old friends and relations – wondering whether perhaps this is not a disease at all but merely a relaxing of some psychological censor which the self imposes to enable us to exist in a totally irrational universe.
Which would mean that dad and all the others are at last seeing things as they really are.
Unvirtual reality.
A sea of troubles.
Confused.
Inconsequential.
Fragments shored against a ruin.
Oh, Mistress Pascoe,
Laud we the gods, and let our crooked smokes climb to their nostrils for glad tidings do I bring and lucky joys. No more I fear the heat of the sun, as time which all these years has wasted me now sets me free, mosthappy news of price, but not for all, for does not time’s whirligig bring in revenges? Thou’rt much in my mind, nor shall I be content till I have seen thy face, when my full eyes shall witness bear to what my full heart feels. May my tears that fall prove holy water on thee! I must be brief, for though my enemies set me free, in freedom lies more danger than in prison, for here through thee and thine the world knows me in their care, but once enlarged, then am I at the mock of all disastrous chances and dangerous accidents by flood and field, with their hands whiter than the paper my obits are writ on and so must wear a mind dark as my fortune or my name. Fate leads me to your side but gives no date, for I must journey now by by-paths and indirect crook’d ways, but sometime sure, when you have quite forgot to look for me, a door shall open, and there shall I be, though you may know me not, but never fear, before I’m done you’ll know me through and through. Till then rest happy while I remain, though brown as earth, as bright unto my vows as faith can raise me.
Close by the margin of a lonely lake, shag-capped by pines that speared a lowering sky from which oozed light unclean whose lurid touch seemed rather to infect than luminate, a deep cave yawned.
Here four men laboured with shovels, their faces wrapped with scarves, not for disguise but as barrier against the stench of the decaying bat droppings they disturbed, while high above them a sea of leathery bodies rippled and whispered uneasily as the sound of digging and the glow of bull-lamps drifted up to the natural vault.
Outside two more men waited silently by a truck which looked almost too broad to have navigated the rutted track curving away like a railway tunnel into the crowding trees. Several yards away on a rocky ledge jutting out over the unmoving, unreflecting waters stood a dusty jeep.
Away to the east, dawn’s rosy fingers were already pulling aside the mists which shrouded the sleeping land, but here the exhalations of the lake still hung grey and heavy over the waters, the vehicle, and the waiting men.
At last from the cave’s black mouth two figures emerged, labouring under the weight of a long metal box they carried between them.
They set it down on the ground behind the truck. One of the waiting men, his thinning yellow hair clinging to his brow like straw to a milkmaid’s buttocks, stooped to unlock the container. Glancing up at the other man from black and bulging eyes, he paused like a vampiricide about to open a coffin, then flung back the lid.
The other man, slim and dark with a narrow moustache, looked down at the oiled and gleaming tubes of metal for a moment, then nodded. The first man snapped his fingers and the diggers closed the box and lifted it onto the back of the truck. Then they returned to the cave, passing en route their two companions staggering out with a second box.
Many times was this journey made, and while the labourers laboured, the watchers went round to the front of the truck and the slim man opened the passenger door, reached inside and picked up a large square leather case which he set on the seat and opened.
The straw-haired, bulging-eyed man produced a flattened cylinder of ivory and pressed a stud to release a long, slightly curved blade. Delicately he nicked two of the plastic containers which packed the case, licked his index finger, inserted it into the first incision, tasted the powder which clung to his damp flesh, repeated the process with the second, and nodded his accord.
The dark man closed the case then took the other’s outstretched hand.
‘Nice to do business,’ said bulging eyes. ‘My best to young Kansas.’
The other looked puzzled for a moment then smiled. The older man too had a speculative look on his face as he held onto the other’s hand rather longer than necessary. Then he too smiled and shook his head as though to dislodge a misplaced thought, let go and took the grip to the jeep where he laid it on the back seat.
By now the loading of the truck was complete and the four diggers stretched their aching limbs in the mouth of the cave and unwound their protecting scarves. Two were ruddy-faced with their exertions, the other two flushed dark beneath their sallow skins.
The first pair went towards the jeep while the second pair joined the slim man who was securing the tailgate of the truck.
These two looked at each other, exchanged a brief eye signal, then reached for the holsters beneath their arms, drew out automatic pistols, and moved towards the jeep, firing as they walked. The two ruddy-faced diggers took the bullets in their backs and pitched forward on their faces while ahead of them the straw-haired man fell backwards, his eyes popping even further in astonishment under the fillet of blood which wrapped itself around his brow.
One of the gunmen continued to the jeep and leaned into it to retrieve the grip. His companion meanwhile turned back to the truck where the slim man was standing as if paralysed.
‘Chiquillo!’ he called. ‘Recuerdo de Jorge. Adiós!’ And let go a long burst.
The slim man felt a whip of hot pain along his ribcage which sent him spinning like a top behind the truck. The rest of the burst went straight through the mouth of the cave where the bullets ricocheted around the granite walls and up into the high vault, triggering first a rustling ripple, then a squeaking, wing-beating eruption of bats.
The gunman paused, looking up in wonderment as the bats skeined out of their rocky roost and smudged the dark air overhead. So many. Who would have thought there would be so many?
Then as they vanished among the trees he resumed his advance.
But the pause had been long enough for the slim man to reach under the truck and drag down the weapon taped beneath the wheel arch.
He shot the gunman through the leg as he passed by the truck’s rear wheel, then through the head as he crashed to the ground.
The second gunman dropped the grip and crouched low with his weapon aimed towards his dying companion.
But the slim man came rolling out of the other side of the truck, and gave himself time to take aim and make sure his first shot found its target.
The second gunman held his crouching position for a moment, then toppled slowly sideways and lay there, gently twitching, his visible eye fixed on the trees’ high vault. The slim man approached carefully, one arm wrapped round his bleeding side, and emptied the clip into the watching eye.
Then he sat down on the grip and pulled open his shirt to examine his wound.
It was more painful than life-threatening, flesh laid bare, a rib nicked perhaps, no deeper penetration. But blood was pouring out and by the time he’d bound it up with strips of shirt torn from the dead gunman at his feet, he’d lost a lot of blood.
He opened the grip, took out one of the packets the pop-eyed man had nicked, poured some of the powder into his hand, raised it to his nose and took a long hard sniff.
Then he took out a mobile phone and dialled.
‘Soy yo… si… I did not think so soon… si…poco… not so wide as a barn door… the CP… it has to be… I am sorry… dos horas… quizá tres… si… at the CP… si, bueno… te quiero… adiós.’
He put the phone away and picked up the grip, wincing with pain. As he moved away, he thought he sensed a movement from the vicinity of the jeep and turned with his gun waving menacingly.
All was still. He hadn’t the strength for closer investigation. And in any case, his gun was empty.
He resumed his progress to the truck.
Getting the grip into the driver’s cab and himself after it was an agony. He sat there for a while, leaning against the wheel. Did something move by the jeep or was it his pain giving false life to this deadly tableau? Certainly in the air above, the bats, reassured by the return of stillness, were flitting back into the mouth of the cave.
He dipped into the grip again, sniffed a little more powder.
Then he switched on the engine, engaged gear, and without a backward glance at the gaping cave, the gloomy lake or the bodies that lay between them, he sent the truck rumbling into the dark tunnel curving away through the crowding trees.
High on the sunlit, windswept Snake Pass which links Lancashire with Yorkshire, Peter Pascoe thought, I’m in love.
Even with a trail of blood running from her nose over the double hump of her full lips to peter out on her charming chin, she was grin-like-an-idiot-gorgeous.
‘You OK?’ he said, grinning like an idiot till he realized that in the circumstances this was perhaps not the most appropriate expression.
‘Yes, yes,’ she said impatiently, dabbing at her nose with a tissue. ‘Is this going to take long?’
The driver of her taxi, to whom the question was addressed, looked from the bent and leaking radiator of his vehicle to the jackknifed lorry he had hit and said sarcastically, ‘Soon as I repair this and get that shifted, we’ll be on our way, luv.’
Pascoe, returning from Manchester over the Snake, had been behind the lorry when it jackknifed. Simple humanitarian concern had brought him running to see if anyone was hurt, but now his sense of responsibility as a policeman was taking over. He pulled out his mobile, dialled 999 and gave a succinct account of what had happened.
‘Better set up traffic diversions way back on both sides,’ he said. ‘The road’s completely blocked till you get something up here to shift the lorry. One injury. Passenger in the taxi banged her nose. Lorry driver probably suffering from shock. Better have an ambulance.’
‘Not for me,’ said the woman vehemently. ‘I’m fine.’
She rose from the verge where she’d been sitting and moved forward on long legs, whose slight unsteadiness only added to their sinuous attraction. She looked as if she purposed to move the lorry single-handed. If it had been sentient, she might have managed it, thought Pascoe.
‘Silly cow’d have been all right if she’d put her seat belt on like I told her,’ said the taxi driver.
‘Perhaps you should have been firmer,’ said Pascoe mildly. ‘Who is she? Where’re you headed?’
No reason why he should have asked or the driver answered these questions, but without his being aware of it, over the years Pascoe had developed a quiet authority of manner which most people found harder to resist than mere assertiveness.
The driver pulled out a docket and said, ‘Miss Kelly Cornelius. Manchester Airport. Terminal Three. She’s going to miss her plane.’
He spoke with a satisfaction which identified him as one of that happily vanishing species, the Ur-Yorkshireman, beside whom even Andy Dalziel appeared a creature of sweetness and light. Only a hardcore misogynist could take pleasure in anything which caused young Miss Cornelius distress.
And she was distressed. She returned from her examination of the lorry and gave Pascoe a look of such expressive unhappiness, his empathy almost caused him to burst into tears.
‘Excuse me,’ she said in a melodious voice in which all that was best of American lightness, Celtic darkness, and English woodnotes wild, conjoined to make sweet moan, ‘but your car’s on the other side of this, I guess.’
‘Yes, I’m on my way home to Mid-Yorkshire,’ he said. ‘Looks like I’ll have to turn around and find another way.’
‘That’s what I thought you’d do,’ she said, her voice breathless with delight, as if he’d just confirmed her estimate of his intellectual brilliance. ‘And I was wondering, I know it’s quite a long way back, but how would you feel about taking me to Manchester Airport? I hate to be a nuisance, but you see, I’ve got this plane to catch, and if I miss it, I don’t know what I’ll do.’
Tears brimmed her big dark eyes. Pascoe could imagine their salty taste on his tongue. What she was asking was of course impossible, but (as he absolutely intended to tell Ellie later when he cleansed his conscience by laundering his prurient thoughts in her sight) it was flattering to be asked.
He said, ‘I’m sorry, but my wife’s expecting me.’
‘You could ring her. You’ve got a phone,’ she said with tremulous appeal. ‘I’d be truly, deeply, madly grateful.’
This was breathtaking, in every sense.
He said, ‘Surely there’ll be another plane. Where are you going anyway?’
Silly question. It implied negotiation.
There was just the hint of a hesitation before she answered, ‘Corfu. It’s my holiday, first for years. And it’s a holiday charter, so if I miss it, there won’t be much chance of getting on another, they’re all so crowded this time of year. And I’m meeting my sister and her little boy at the airport, and she’s disabled and won’t get on the plane without me, so it’ll be all our holidays ruined. Please.’
Suddenly he knew he was going to do it. All right, it was crazy, but he was going to have to go back all the way to Glossop anyway and the airport wasn’t much further, well, not very much further…
He said, ‘I’ll need to phone my wife.’
‘That’s marvellous. Oh, thank you, thank you!’
She gave him a smile which made all things seem easy – the drive back, the phone call to Ellie, everything – then dived into the taxi and emerged with a small leather case like a pilot’s flight bag.
Travelling light, thought Pascoe as he stepped back to get some privacy for his call home. The woman was now talking to the taxi driver and presumably paying him off. There seemed to be some disagreement. Pascoe guessed the driver was demanding the full agreed fare on the grounds that it wasn’t his fault he hadn’t got her all the way to Terminal 3.
Terminal 3.
Last time he’d flown out of Manchester, Terminal 3 had been for British Airways and domestic flights only.
You couldn’t fly charter to Corfu from there.
Perhaps the driver had made a mistake.
Or perhaps things had changed at Manchester in the past six months.
But now he was recalling the slight hesitancy before the sob story. And would a young woman on holiday really travel so light…?
Pascoe, he said to himself, you’re developing a nasty suspicious policeman’s mind.
He turned away and began to punch buttons on his phone.
When it was answered he identified himself, talked for a while, then waited.
In the distance he heard the wail of sirens approaching.
A voice spoke in his ear. He listened, asked a couple of questions, then rang off.
When he turned, Kelly Cornelius was standing by the taxi, smiling expectantly at him. A police car pulled up onto the verge beside him. An ambulance wasn’t far behind.
As the driver of the police car opened his door to get out, Pascoe stooped to him. Screened by the car, he pulled out his ID, showed it to the uniformed constable and spoke urgently.
Then he straightened up, waved apologetically to the waiting woman, flourishing his phone as if to say he hadn’t been able to get through before.
He began to dial again, watching as the policemen went across to the taxi and started talking to the driver and the woman.
‘Hi,’ said Pascoe. ‘It’s me. Yes, I’m on my way but there’s been an accident… no, I’m not involved but I am stuck, the road’s blocked, and I’m going to have to divert… yeah, take me when I come… give Rosie a kiss… how’s she been today?… yes, I know, it’s early days… it’ll be OK, I promise… love you… ’bye.’
He switched off and went back to the taxi.
‘What the hell do you mean, I can’t go?’ the young woman was demanding. Anger like injury did nothing to detract from her beauty.
‘Sorry, miss,’ said the policeman stolidly. ‘Can’t let you leave the scene of an accident where someone’s been injured.’
‘But I’m the one who’s been injured so if I say it doesn’t matter…’
‘Doesn’t work like that,’ said the policeman. ‘Need to get you checked out at hospital. There may be claims. Also you’re a witness. We’ll need a statement.’
‘But I’ve got a plane to catch.’ Her gaze met Pascoe’s. ‘Corfu. It’s my holiday.’
A sharp intake of breath from the policeman.
‘Certainly can’t let you leave the country, miss, that’s definite,’ he said. ‘Here’s the ambulance lads now. Why not let them give you the once-over while I talk to these other gents?’
Pascoe caught her eye and shrugged helplessly. She looked back at him, her face (still beautiful) now ravaged with shock and betrayal, as Andromeda might have looked if Perseus, on point of rescuing her from the ravening dragon, had suddenly remembered a previous appointment.
‘Well, if you’re done with me, Officer, I think I’d better start finding another route home,’ he said, looking away, unable to bear that devastatingly devastated expression.
The constable said, ‘Right, sir. We’ve got your name in case we need to be in touch. Goodbye now.’
As he made his way back to his car, Pascoe reflected on the paradox that now he felt much more guilty about Kelly Cornelius than he had before, when it had just been a question of simple reflexive desire.
Women, he thought as he sat in his car and put the necessary enquiries in train. Women! All of them queens of discord, blessed with the power even on the slightest acquaintance to get in a man’s mind and divide and rule. Look at him now, sitting here when he should be heading home, checking out his vague suspicions like a good professional, uncertain whether he would be bothering if he hadn’t felt so ready to submit to this lovely creature’s control, with part of him hoping even as he started the process that he was going to come out of this looking a real dickhead.
Women. How come they didn’t rule the universe?
COMFORT BLANKET
Arms and the Men they sang, who played at Troy
Until they broke it like a spoiled child’s Toy
Then sailed away, the Winners heading home,
The Losers to a new Play-pen called Rome.
Behind, like Garbage from their vessels flung,
– Submiss, submerged, but certainly not sung –
A wake of Women trailed in long Parade,
The reft, the raped, the slaughtered, the betrayed.
Oh, Shame! that so few sagas celebrate
Their Pain, their Perils, their no less moving Fate!
But mine won’t either, for why should it when
The proper Study of Mendacity is MEN?
BOOK ONE (#ulink_b12c08d2-2b6d-5a29-beca-f77ced5eff70)
‘Your pretty daughter,’ she said, ‘starts to hear of such things. Yet,’ looking full upon her, ‘you may be sure that there are men and women already on their road, who have their business to do with you, and who will do it. Of a certainty they will do it. They may be coming hundreds, thousands, of miles over the sea there; they may be close at hand now; they may be coming, for anything you know, or anything you can do to prevent it, from the vilest sweepings of this very town.’
CHARLES DICKENS: Little Dorrit
i
spelt from Sibyl’s leaves (#ulink_ff097a81-f5b7-5e4d-b4e8-3ec0b1256b90)
Eleanor Soper…
The little patch of blue I can see through the high round window is probably the sky, but it could just as well be a piece of blue backcloth or a painted flat.
licks up the blood from the square where a riot has been…
Distantly I hear a clatter of hooves. They’re changing guard at… I’ve heard them do it thousands of times. But hearing’s as far as it goes. They could be mere sound effects, played on tape. You don’t take anything on trust in this business. Not even your friends. Especially not them.
I who know everything knew nothing till I knew that.
what does it mean?…
The only unquestionable reality lies in the machine.
But while reality hardly changes at all, the machine has changed a lot. It grows young as I grow old.
Shall I like my namesake grow old forever?
My namesake, I say. After so long usage, am I beginning to believe as so many of the young ones clearly believe that my name really is Sibyl? Strange that the name my parents gave me also labelled me as a woman of magic, but an enchantress as well as a seer. Morgan. Morgan Meredith. Morgan le Fay, as Gaw used to call me in the days of his enchantment.
But now my enchanting days are over. And it was Gaw who rechristened me when he saw that I had no magic to counter the sickness in my blood.
A wise man hides his mistakes in plain sight, then over long time slowly corrects them.
My dear old friend Gawain Clovis Sempernel is a wise man. No one would deny it. Not if they’ve any sense.
Aroynt thee, hag. Ripeness is all. And I have work to do.
When I first took on my sacred office, the machine loomed monumentally, like a Victorian family tomb. Thirty years on, it’s smaller than an infant’s casket, leaving plenty of room on the narrow tabletop for my flask and mug, and also my inhaler and pill dispenser, though generally I keep these hidden. Sounds silly when you’re in a wheelchair, but I was brought up to believe you don’t advertise your frailties.
That’s a lesson a lot of folk never learn, which is why so many of them end up frozen in my electronic casket where there’s always room for plenty more.
If I wanted I could ask it to tell me exactly how many people had passed through my hands, or rather my fingertips, for that’s the closest I get to actually handling people. But I don’t bother. This isn’t about statistics, this is about individuals.
Eleanor Soper…
My casket is also an incubator. Here they make their first appearance, often looking completely helpless and harmless. But, oh, how quickly they grow, and I oversee their progress with an almost parental pride as their details accumulate and their files fatten out.
Some live up to their promise. (By which I mean threat!)
Others, apparently, change direction completely. Such converts I always regard with grave suspicion, even if – especially if – they make it to the very top. They’re either faking it, in which case we’re ready for them. Or they’re genuine, which means the contents of these files could be a serious embarrassment.
It’s always nice to know you can embarrass your masters.
But the great majority merely fade away, become ghosts of their vibrant young selves.
married a cop, had a kid, didn’t march any more…
what was it for?
Let’s take a look at your protesting career, Eleanor Pascoe née Soper.
Amnesty – member, non-active; Anti-Fascist Action – lapsed; Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament – lapsed; Gay Rights – lapsed; Graduates Against God – lapsed; Greenpeace – member, non-active; Labour Party –member, non-active; Liberata Trust –member, active; Quis Custodiet? – lapsed; Third World United – lapsed; Women’s Rights Action Group – lapsed; World Socialist Alliance – lapsed.
Once you squawked so loud in your incubator, Eleanor, now you rest so quiet.
Gaw Sempernel (let no dog bark) says there is nothing so suspicious as silence. Must have watched a lot of cowboy films in his youth. It’s quiet out there, Gaw… too damn quiet!
Certainly neither sound nor silence gets you out of my casket. Once inside, there you stay forever. And if your presence is ever needed, you can be conjured up in a trice, like the wraiths of the classical underworld, which, as my classically educated Gawain likes to remind me, were summoned to appear and to speak by the smell and the taste of fresh blood.
For machines may change, and fashions change, and human flesh, God help us, changes most inevitably of all.
But some people, my people, have at their hearts something which refuses to change, despite all that life shows them by way of contra-evidence. Perhaps it is a genetic weakness. Certainly, once established, like the common cold, no one has yet found a way of eradicating it.
Which is why I, practising what I preach, have demonstrated to the world (or that section of it which shares this remote and lonely building in the heart of this populous city), that there is life after death by staying in gainful employment all these years, Sibyl the Sibyl, sitting here in my solitary cell, hung high in my lonely cage, laying the bodies out neatly in my electronic casket, and, when necessary, conjuring them back to life.
My poor benighted ghosts scenting blood once more…
Like Eleanor Soper.
All these looney people, where do they all come from?
All these looney people, where do they all belong?
ii
who’s that knocking at my door? (#ulink_467e279c-433a-5aa9-a6fd-aef9ff753b51)
…why should it, when
The proper study of mendacity is MEN?
Chapter 1
It was a dark and stormy night.
Now, why has that gone down in the annals as the archetype of the rotten opening? she wondered. It’s not much different from It was a bright cold day in April, though, fair do’s, the bit about the clocks striking thirteen grabs the attention. Or how about There was no possibility of taking a walk that day, with all the stuff about the weather that follows? And even Homer’s jam-packed with meteorology. OK, so what follows in every case is a lot better book than Paul Clifford, but even if we stick to the same author, surely the dark and stormy stuff isn’t in the same league as the opening of The Last Days of Pompeii (which, interestingly, I found on Andy Dalziel’s bedside table when I used a search for the loo as an excuse to do a bit of nebbing! Riddle me that, my Trinity scholar!).
How does it go? ‘Ho, Diomed, well met! Do you sup with Glaucus tonight?’ said a young man of small stature, who wore his tunic in the loose and effeminate folds which proved him to be a gentleman and a coxcomb. Now that is positively risible, while the dark and stormy night is simply a cliché which, like all clichés, was at its creation bright new coin.
So up yours, all you superior bastards who get on the media chat shows. I’m sticking with it!
It was a dark and stormy night. The wind was blowing off the sea and the guard commander bowed into it with his cloak wrapped around his face as he left the shelter of the grove and began to clamber up to the headland.
The darkness was deep but not total. There was salt and spume in the wind giving it a ghostly visibility, and now a huge flock of white sea birds riding the blast went screeching by only a few feet over his head.
The superstitious fools huddled round their fires in the camp below would probably take them as an omen and argue over which god was telling them what and pour out enough libations to get the whole of Olympus pissed. But the commander didn’t even flinch.
As he neared the crest of the headland, hescrewed up his eyes and peered ahead, looking for a darker outline against the black sky which should show where the wind wrapped itself around the sentry. There’d been grumblings among the weary crewmen when he’d insisted on posting a full contingent of perimeter guards. In the forty-eight hours since they made landfall, they’d found no sign of human habitation, and with the storm which had made them run for shelter blowing as hard as ever, the threat of a seaborne attack seemed negligible. With the democracy of shared hardship, they’d even appealed over his head to the Prince.
‘So you feel safe?’ he’d said. ‘Is that more safe or less safe than when you saw the Greek ships sail away?’
That had shut them up. But the commander had resolved to make the rounds himself to check that none of the posted sentries, feeling secure in the pseudo-isolation of the storm, had opted for comfort rather than watch.
And it seemed his distrust was justified. His keen gaze found no sign of any human figure on the skyline. Then a small movement at ground level caught his straining eyes. Cautiously he advanced. The movement again. And now he could make out the figure of a man stretched out on his stomach right at the cliff’s edge.
Silently he drew his sword and moved closer. If the idle bastard had fallen asleep he was in for a painful reveille. But when he was only a paceaway, his foot kicked a stone and the sentry’s head turned and their eyes met.
Far from showing alarm, the man looked relieved. He laid a finger over his lips, then motioned to the commander to join him prostrate.
When they were side by side, the sentry put his mouth to his ear and said, ‘I think there’s someone down there, Commander.’
It didn’t seem likely, but this was a battle-scarred veteran who’d spent ten years patrolling the Wall, not some fresh-faced kid who saw a bear in every bush.
Cautiously he wriggled forward till his head was over the edge and looked down.
He knew from memory that the rocky cliff fell sheer for at least eighty feet down to a tiny shingly cove, but now it was like looking into hellmouth, where Pyriphlegethon’s burning waves drive their phosphorescent crests deep into the darkness of woeful Acheron.
Nothing could live down there, nothing that still had dependence on light and air anyway, and he was moving back to give the sentry a tongue-lashing when suddenly the wind tore a huge hole in the cloud cover and a full moon lit up the scene like a thousand lanterns.
Now he saw, though he could hardly believe what he saw.
The waves had momentarily retreated to reveal the figure of a man crawling out of the sea. Then the gale sent its next wall of water rushing forwardand the figure was buried beneath it. Impossible to survive, he thought. But when the sea receded, it was still there, hands and feet dug deep into the shingle. And in the few seconds of respite given by the withdrawing waters, the man scrambled forward another couple of feet before sinking his anchors once again.
Sometimes the suction of the retreating waves was too strong, or his anchorage was too shallow, and the recumbent body was drawn back the full length of its advance. But always when it seemed certain that the ocean must have driven deep into his lungs, or the razor-edged shingle must have ripped his naked chest wide open, the figure pushed itself forward once more.
‘He’ll never make it,’ said the sentry with utter assurance.
The guard commander watched a little while longer then said, ‘Six to four he does. In gold.’
The veteran looked down at the sea which now seemed to be clutching at the body on the beach with a supernatural fury. It looked like a sure-fire bet, but he had a lot of respect for the commander’s judgement.
‘Silver,’ he compromised.
They settled to watch.
It took another half-hour for the commander to win his bet, but finally the crawling man had dragged himself right up to the foot of the cliff where a couple of huge boulders resting on the beach formed a protective wall against which thesea dashed its mountainous missiles in vain. For a while he lay there, still immersed in water from time to time, but no longer at risk of being either beaten flat or dragged back into the depths. Then, just when the sentry was hoping he might claim victory in the bet by reason of the man’s death, he sat upright.
‘That sod must be made of bronze and bear hide,’ said the sentry with reluctant admiration. ‘What the fuck’s he doing now?’
For the figure on the beach had pushed himself to his feet, and as the waters drew back, he emerged from his rocky refuge and, to the observers’ amazement, began a kind of lumbering dance, following the receding waves, then backpedalling like mad as they drove forward once more. And all the while he was gesticulating, sometimes putting his left hand in the crook of his right elbow and thrusting his right fist into the air, sometimes putting both his thumbs into his mouth, then pulling them out with great force and stabbing his forefingers seawards, and shouting.
‘I’ve seen that before,’ said the sentry. ‘That’s what them bastards used to do under the Wall.’
‘Hush! I’m trying to hear what he’s saying,’ said the commander.
As if in response, the wind fell for a moment and the sea drew back to its furthest point yet, still pursued by the dancing man whose shouts now drifted clearly up the cliff face.
‘Up yours, old man!’ he yelled. ‘Call yourselfearthshaker? You couldn’t shake your dick at a pisspot! So what are you going to do now, you watery old git? Ha ha! Right up yours!’
‘You’re right. He’s a Greek,’ said the commander.
‘Better still, he’s a dead Greek,’ said the veteran with some satisfaction.
For in his growing boldness, the dancing man had allowed himself to be lured far away from his protective wall by this moment of comparative calm, so when the ocean suddenly exploded before him, he had no hope of getting back to safety. An avalanche of water far greater than anything before descended on him, driving him to the ground, then burying him deep. And at the same time the renewed fury of the wind sewed up the rent in the cloud and darkness fell.
‘If he was talking to who I think he was talking to, he was a right idiot,’ said the sentry piously. ‘You gotta give the gods respect else they’ll chew you up and spit you out.’
The commander smiled.
‘Let’s see,’ he said.
They didn’t have long to wait. As though the storm also wanted to look at the results of its latest onslaught, it tore aside the clouds once more.
‘Well, bull my bollocks and call me Zeus!’ exclaimed the sentry, his recent piety completely forgotten.
There he was again, almost back where he’d started but still alive. Once more he started tostruggle back over the beach. Only now as the waves retreated, they didn’t leave any area of visible shingle but a foot or so of water. This made the anchoring process much more difficult, but at the same time, by permitting the man to take a couple of swimming strokes with his muscular arms, it speeded his return to the safety of the boulders. Here he squatted, his head slumped on his broad chest which rose and fell as he drew in great breaths of damp air.
‘He’s game,’ said the sentry grudgingly. ‘Got to give him that. But he’s not out of trouble yet. How high do you reckon the tide comes in here, Commander?’
‘Normally? I think it would just about reach the bottom of the cliff, a foot up at its highest. But this isn’t normal. I don’t know whether it’s a very angry god or just very bad weather, but I’d say the way this wind’s blowing the sea in, it will be thirty feet up the cliff face in an hour.’
‘So that really is it,’ said the sentry with some satisfaction.
‘Not necessarily. He can climb.’
‘Up that rock face? Get on! It’s smooth and it’s sheer and there’s an overhang at the top. I wouldn’t fancy my chances there at my peak on a fine day, and that old bugger must be completely knackered.’
‘Double or quits on what you owe?’ said the commander casually.
The sentry turned his head to look at the officer’sprofile, but it was as blank and unreadable as the cliff face, and not a lot more attractive either.
Then he looked down. The man was up to his knees in water already.
‘Done,’ said the sentry.
Below, the Greek was examining the cliff face. His features were undiscernible through a heavy tangle of beard, but even at this distance they could see the eyes shining brightly in the reflection of the moonlight. He rubbed his hands vigorously against the remnants of his robe in what had to be a vain attempt to get them dry, then he reached up and began to climb.
He got about three feet above the water level before he lost his grip and slithered back down. Three more times he tried, three more times he fell. And each time he hit the water, it was higher than before.
‘Looks like we’re quits, Commander,’ said the sentry.
‘Maybe.’
‘What’s the silly old sod doing now?’
The silly old sod was ripping the sleeves off his tattered robe, and tying them to form a rough sack which he hung on a jag of rock protruding from one of his protective boulders. Next he knelt down in the water facing the boulder, took a deep breath, and plunged his head beneath the surface. When he emerged, he tossed what looked like a stone into the dangling sack. Again and again he did this.
‘I know,’ said the sentry. ‘He’s digging a tunnel.’
He laughed raucously at his own wit till the guard commander said coldly, ‘Shut up. You might learn something.’
The sentry stopped laughing. Shared hardship might relax the bonds of discipline slightly, but he and his comrades knew just how far they could go.
Finally the Greek stood upright once more, slung the sack around his neck, put both hands into it, then reached up the cliff face. He seemed to lean against it for a long moment, almost as if he were praying. Then he began to climb again.
The sentry waited for him to fall. But he didn’t. From time to time he dipped into his sack, then reached up again in search of another handhold. As on the beach, progress was painfully slow, and occasionally one of his holds failed and he’d slip back a little, but still he kept coming.
‘How in the name of Zeus is he doing that?’ said the sentry. ‘It’s just not possible!’
‘Molluscs,’ said the commander.
‘No need to be like that, sir,’ said the sentry resentfully. ‘I was only asking.’
‘I said, molluscs. Clams, mussels, oysters, anything he could find. He’s holding them against the wall till their suckers take a hold. Then he uses them as a ladder.’
‘Clams, you say? Them things couldn’t hold a man, surely?’
‘Three might. He only moves one foot or hand at a time. And he’s using any holds he can find in the rock face too. He’s a truly ingenious fellow.’
The sentry shook his head in reluctant admiration. As if taking this as confirmation that their prey was close to escaping them, the waves hurled themselves with renewed force against the cliff, breaking over the climbing man and spraying flakes of spume over the watchers above.
A harsh grating noise reached them also.
‘The bugger’s laughing!’ said the sentry.
‘Of course he’s laughing. He wants the cliff face to be as wet as possible. That’s the way the molluscs like it. The wetter the surface, the tighter their grip.’
The wind closed the gap in the clouds once more. This, coupled with the fact that the climber was now approaching the overhang, took him out of the watchers’ sight. The sentry pushed himself back from the edge, squatted to his haunches and drew his sword.
‘Let’s see if he’s still laughing when he sticks his head over the top and I cut his throat,’ he said, testing the metal’s edge with his thumb.
The guard commander said nothing but squatted beside him. They had to lean into the wind to avoid being blown backwards and from time to time their faces were lashed with salt water as the ocean rose to new heights of fury in its efforts to wash the climber free.
Minutes passed. The watchers didn’t move. Theyhad had years to learn that patience too is one of the great military arts.
Finally the sentry’s face began to show his suspicion that the sea must after all have won its battle against the climbing Greek. He glanced at the guard commander. But his was a face as jagged and pocked as a city wall after long siege, and quite unreadable at the best of times, so the sentry didn’t risk speaking and returned to his watch.
A few moments later he was glad of his self-restraint. A new sound drifted up the cliff face amidst the lash of water and howl of wind. It was the noise of laboured breathing, getting closer.
The sentry began to smile in happy anticipation. He decided not just to slit the throat but to have a go at taking the whole head off. It would be fun to go back into the camp and toss it down among his half-waking comrades and say negligently, ‘Got myself another Greek while you idle sods were sleeping.’
The breathing was loud now. The sentry moved his position so that he was right above it. An arm like a small tree trunk was swung up to rest on the edge of the cliff, and then a shag of salt-caked hair appeared, and finally the man’s head came fully into view and a pair of deep-sunk, intensely blue eyes took in the waiting men.
‘How do, chuck,’ said the Greek.
The sentry rocked forward on his toes and shot out his left hand to grab the grizzled hair. Butquick as he moved, the Greek was quicker. His other hand came into view, grasping a large jagged clamshell. It snaked out almost faster than the eye could follow, and the next moment the sentry’s left wrist was slit through to the bone.
He fell backward, shrieking. His right hand released his sword as he grasped the gaping wound to staunch the spurting blood. The Greek dropped the shell and reached out to pick up the fallen weapon. Then a heavy-shod foot crashed down on his forearm and pinned it to the ground.
He looked up at the unreadably rugged face of the guard commander and smiled through his tangle of beard.
‘Thanks, chuck,’ he said. ‘Saved me from a nasty fall.’
‘Kill the bastard, Commander,’ urged the ashen-faced sentry. ‘Chop his fucking arm right off!’
The commander was aware of the blue eyes fixed quizzically on his face as he debated the matter.
‘Not yet,’ he said finally. ‘Not till we know if there are any more of his kind about. Besides, the men need cheering up after what’s happened recently, and I reckon a clever old Greek like this will take a long time dying.’
‘Long as you like, Captain,’ said the Greek. ‘I’m in no hurry whatsoever. I’ll
‘Shit,’ said Ellie Pascoe.
Through the open window of the boxroom which she refused to dignify with the name study she had heard a car turning into their short drive.
She finished reading, take as long as ever you like.’, pressed Save to preserve her corrections and went to the window.
A man and a woman were getting out of the car and heading for the front door.
‘Hello,’ called Ellie.
This voice from above made them start like guilty things surprised, and the woman dropped her car keys.
Perhaps they think it’s the voice of God, thought Ellie.
Or perhaps (one thought leading to another) they think they are the voice of God.
‘If you’re Witnesses,’ she called, ‘I think I should tell you we’re all communist satanists here. I’ll be happy to send you some of our literature.’
‘Mrs Pascoe?’ said the woman. ‘Mrs Ellie Pascoe?’
She didn’t look like a Witness. And Witnesses didn’t drive big BMWs.
A pair of assertions as unsupported as a Hottentot’s tits (she plucked the phrase from her collection of Andy Dalziel memorabilia), but evidence is what we look for when intuition fails (one of her constabulary-baiting own).
‘Hang on. I’ll come down,’ she said.
By the time she got downstairs and opened the front door, the couple had recovered their composure. Now they just looked concerned.
‘Mrs Pascoe?’ said the man, who was slim, thirtyish, not bad-looking and wearing a rather nice Prince of Wales check suit which looked like it had been cut in Savile Row. Would look even nicer on Peter. ‘You are Mrs Pascoe?’
‘I thought we’d established that.’
‘My name’s Jim Westcombe. I’m with the council’s Education Welfare Department. It’s about your daughter, Rose. She’s at Edengrove Junior, isn’t she?’
‘Yes, but not today. I mean, it’s their end-of-term trip to Tegley Hall Theme Park… look, what’s this about?’ Ellie demanded.
The man and woman looked at each other, then the man went on, ‘Honestly, there’s nothing to worry about, she’s fine, you’re not to worry, really…’
‘What?’
There are few things more worrying to a mother than being told not to worry, especially a mother who a few short weeks ago was sitting by a hospital bed, not knowing if her child was going to recover from meningitis or not.
The woman gave her a look which combined empathy of her feelings and exasperation at her companion’s heavy-handedness.
‘Jim, shut up,’ she said. ‘Mrs Pascoe, the coach taking the children to Tegley has broken down. There’s a replacement coach on the way, but it seems your little girl wasn’t feeling too well and the head teacher thought it best to make arrangements to get her home, only when he tried to ring you he couldn’t get through…’
Ellie turned and grabbed the hall phone. It was dead. In the mirror hanging above the phone, she saw an unrecognizably pale face whose pallor shone through her summer tan like a corpse-light through muslin. This was it. This was the punishment she deserved. She had brought it on herself… worse… on Rosie… on Peter…
‘… so he tried your husband but he wasn’t available, so then he rang into the Education office and as Jim and I were coming out this way and would be passing your road end, we said we’d call and check if you were in.’
‘Oh God,’ said Ellie.
I’m confused, she thought. I’m not hearing properly.
She leaned against the door frame to steady herself and the woman reached forward to rest her hand on Ellie’s arm and said, ‘Really, it’s OK, Mrs Pascoe. You know how it is, end of term, kids getting excited, rushing around like mad. I’ve got two myself, I know how they can keep us frightened, believe me. It’s just a matter of getting out there to pick the little girl up. Have you got your car here? Jim can go with you, he knows where the breakdown happened. I can’t come myself, I’m afraid. I’ve got an urgent appointment, but Jim can spare a couple of hours, can’t you, Jim? He’ll even drive if you don’t feel up to it.’
‘Surely,’ said the man. ‘No problem at all. Let’s get started, shall we? Sooner we’re on the way, sooner you can get your little girl home.’
Ellie took a deep breath. It wasn’t enough. She took another. It was like squirting oil onto a piece of rusty machinery. She could almost hear the gears of her mind starting to grate against each other as she reviewed everything that had been said to her.
She said, ‘Sorry. This has knocked me out. I’m not usually so slow. It was just a bit of a shock. I thought you were trying to tell me there’s been an accident…’
‘Nothing like that,’ said the woman. ‘Really.’
‘And did you talk to Mr Johnson, the head, yourself? You’re sure he said it was nothing to worry about?’
‘Yes, I spoke direct with Mr Johnson,’ said the woman firmly. ‘Just a tummy bug, he reckoned. But she really wants to be home rather than bumping around on a bus all day.’
‘And if it was anything more serious, the sooner we get out there, the better, eh?’ said the man heartily.
‘Jim, please!’ said the woman reprimandingly.
‘No, it’s OK,’ said Ellie, stepping forward and smiling at the man. ‘It’s always best to be ready for the worst. Are you ready, Mr Westcombe?’
Then she brought her knee up as hard as she could between his legs.
It was good to see his face drain pale as her own.
Now she swung her right arm round hard at the woman’s neck. The blow would probably have felled her, but she was quick and ducked low, though not low enough to avoid all contact. Ellie’s hand caught her on the temple just above the right eye with enough force to send her reeling back into the Climbing Pompon de Paris growing up the pillar to the left of the front porch.
When Ellie had bought it, Peter had grumbled that nowadays it was surely possible to get a less prickly, more user-friendly rose, but she’d been unrepentant. The tiny pink pompom blossoms had been her father’s favourite before Alzheimer’s robbed him of even that. And now, as she heard the woman scream, Ellie knew she’d always love the thorns too.
She retreated over her threshold and slammed the door shut. Ramming the bolts home, she became aware of pain in her right wrist, and as she slid to the floor with her back against the door, in her right knee too. She sat there, breathing deep, as if she’d just run a hundred metres up a steep hill. Outside she heard car doors shut and an engine start up and reverse away.
She sat there till there was nothing to hear but her own harsh breathing, and when that too finally faded, she rose and went to an upstairs window and looked down at the empty driveway.
Whatever had happened was over. So why did she feel it had just begun?
iii (#ulink_2642bfb3-8c8d-510c-a73f-736d87642bda)
memories are made of this (#ulink_2642bfb3-8c8d-510c-a73f-736d87642bda)
‘And you kneed him in the balls?’ said Detective Superintendent Andy Dalziel gleefully. ‘Well done, lass.’
‘Sure. Except they must have been made of brass,’ said Ellie, who was sitting sideways on a sofa with a large pack of frozen oven chips draped over her knee and a smaller pack of fish fingers pressed against her wrist. Having a non-gourmet kid sometimes came in useful. ‘Have they got hold of Peter yet?’
This was aimed at Detective Sergeant Edgar Wield who’d just entered the room, carrying a mobile phone.
‘No, but they’re still there, they’ve located the coach. I’ve sent Seymour down there. He’ll spot them eventually, but Tegley Hall Theme Park’s a big place. And you said you didn’t want him paged over the speakers.’
‘No,’ said Ellie firmly. ‘Softly, softly. I don’t want him getting the kind of shock I had.’
The two detectives exchanged glances, then Dalziel said, ‘Talking of which, lass, as you won’t let us take you to the quackery, I’ve got Wieldy here to organize the quack to come to you. And afore you start sounding off again, I reckon you could do with a bit more than fish and chips for them joints of yours. Also, I don’t like your colour.’
‘And I bet you’ve arrested people for less than that. Sorry, Andy. That was stupid. I’m still feeling so angry. As for my colour, you should have seen me half an hour ago. I was grey. Not as grey as that bastard, though, after I’d kneed him.’
‘Aye, that’s where we’d got to, wasn’t it?’
‘Second time round!’
‘Aye, well. You were a bit excitable, first time.’
‘Hysterical, you mean?’
‘Nay, lass. You know me, if I’d meant hysterical, I’d have said it. Wieldy, you’re lurking. Summat else?’
‘Checked with the Education Department. No one there called Westcombe or fitting the descriptions.’
‘Christ, you’re checking up on me!’ exclaimed Ellie angrily. ‘You think maybe I just lose it when I’m confronted by stupid officials? Well, you could be about to find out you’re right.’
Wield went on as if she hadn’t spoken. ‘The car’s number. How sure are you you got it right?’
‘As sure as I could be considering it was going through my mind these two wanted to abduct me in order to do God knows what to me. So if I got a figure wrong, it wouldn’t be surprising, would it? But it was definitely a dark-blue BMW, one of the big ones. Look, why’re you wasting time grilling me like this? I scribbled everything I could remember down soon as I could. Christ, I haven’t been married to the Force all these years without picking up some of your nasty habits. Why aren’t you out there looking for these people?’
‘You’d be surprised how often I get asked that question and I’ve not worked out a smart answer yet,’ said Dalziel. ‘Can’t even say it’s raining. Why’re you asking about the car, Wieldy?’
‘Did a check, sir. And according to Swansea, what Ellie gave us isn’t a number in use.’
‘False plates then,’ said Dalziel. ‘But try the obvious variations just in case.’
‘Yes, sir. By the way, phone wire was shorted with a pin where it goes into the hall window. Pull it out, it should be OK, but we won’t touch it till Forensic’s finished out there. Oh, and Novello’s here.’
‘Ivor? Good. Send her in.’
‘Hang about,’ said Ellie. ‘If you’re thinking I need a friendly female copper to unburden my heart to…’
‘Nay. I brought her for the strip search but I’ll do it if you like,’ said Dalziel.
Wield made for the door.
Ellie said, ‘Wieldy, sorry I snapped at you. I think I may still be a bit… excitable.’
The sergeant’s generally inscrutable features which, in Dalziel’s words, were knobbly enough to make a pineapple look like a pippin, smoothed momentarily into a warm smile, and he said, ‘I’ll let you know soon as we get a hold of Pete.’
‘By God,’ said Dalziel after the sergeant had gone. ‘Was that a smile, or has he got toothache? Nearest yon bugger ever came to cracking his face at me was the time I fell into the swimming pool at the mayor’s reception. Oh aye. I see you remember that too.’
A smile had touched Ellie’s lips, and she forced it to broaden as she saw the Fat Man observing her closely. Anything was better than having a womanly weep in front of Andy Dalziel. And even more, in front of Detective Constable Shirley Novello, who had just slipped into the room. Five-four, sturdy frame, minimum make-up, dark-brown hair neat but nothing fancy, baggy sweatshirt and matching slacks, she should have been two steps from invisible, which was presumably her intention. Down-dressing did not deceive Ellie Pascoe’s expert eye, however. She’d heard her husband talk a little too appreciatively of the girl’s professional qualities, and she saw the way even Fat Andy’s spirits perked up a notch or two at her entry. This was definitely one to watch.
‘You going to make an old man happy, lass?’ said Dalziel.
‘Don’t think so, sir. Just a first take on house-to-house. We’ve got two people who noticed the BMW. Confirmation of colour, but nothing extra on the numberplate. One of them thought it had an unusually long aerial compared with her husband’s car, which is the same model.’
‘Well-heeled neighbours you’ve got, Ellie,’ said the Fat Man. ‘Mebbe we’re paying Pete too much. That it, Ivor?’
‘Except for an old lady lives at the corner, towards town, that is, says she looked out to see what all the fuss was when she heard the sirens and saw a car doing a three-point turn and going back the way it came. Metallic-blue, sounds like a Golf. Driver looked swarthy and sinister, she says.’
‘Watch a lot of telly, does she? Ivor, it’s what happened before we came that I’m interested in. Afterwards, any poor sod driving along and seeing the street full of flashing fuzz is going to find another route, specially if he’s had a swift snort or two at a business meeting.’
The notion was suggestive. Ellie looked longingly at the bottle of Scotch which the Fat Man had dug out as soon as he arrived. At the time it had seemed virtuously sensible to quote what her first aid course said about avoiding alcohol in cases of shock, but now it seemed merely priggish.
She said, ‘OK, Andy. Let’s do it one more time. Then I don’t care if it brings on complete amnesia, I’m going to have that drink you prescribed.’
‘I’m feeling better already,’ said Dalziel. ‘No, Ivor, don’t sneak off. Got your short stubby pencil ready? I want you taking notes. Everything, not just what you think’s important, OK?’
‘Sir,’ said Novello.
Her eyes met Ellie Pascoe’s and she gave a little smile. All she got in return was a small frown. Confirming what she’d felt on their previous few meetings, that La Pascoe didn’t much like her. Couldn’t blame her, the WDC thought complacently. When I’m her age, I’ve no intention of liking good-looking women ten years my junior who work with my husband. Not that her own husband, if she ever bothered, would be anything like Chief Inspector Pascoe. It would probably be a comfort to Ellie Pascoe to know that her fantasies featured chunky, hairy men on surf-pounded beaches, not slim, nice-mannered introverts who would feel it necessary to buy you a decent French meal before checking into a good four-star hotel. But it was not a comfort she was about to offer.
The Great God Dalziel was speaking.
‘Right, lass. One more time. You were really taken in at first?’
‘Damn right I was. All I could think was, not again, oh God, it’s not all happening again. You know, Rosie in hospital, me camping out there, all the fears…’
The memory of that time was still so powerful, it had the therapeutic effect of reducing her present aftershock to manageable size, and she went on more strongly, ‘She’d only gone back to school for this final week before the summer hols… she insisted, and you know Rosie, when she makes up her mind…’
‘Can’t think who she takes after,’ said Dalziel. ‘Wanted to see all her mates, did she? And not miss this end-of-term outing.’
‘Both of those. Also to get out from under me, I suspect.’
‘Eh?’
Ellie said, ‘Andy, I’m ready for that drink now. Please.’
She took the proffered tumbler and said scornfully, ‘That wouldn’t drown a tall gnat. Cheers.’
It went down in one. Dalziel, who’d poured himself a good three inches, poured her another millimetre.
‘God Almighty, man! And it’s not even your whisky,’ she said.
‘Not my stomach either,’ said Dalziel. ‘You said something about Rosie getting out from under you. Never had you down as the clinging-mother type.’
‘No? Perhaps not.’
She brooded on this for a moment, glanced at Novello, then, with an effort at matter-of-factness, went on, ‘Since we got her back, after the meningitis, I’ve hardly been able to bear letting her out of my sight. She goes in the garden to play and two minutes later I have a panic attack. I think in the end I just began to get on her nerves, so school seemed a desirable alternative.’
‘Nay, you know what kids are like about missing things…’
‘The trip to Tegley Hall, you mean? Well, there’s another thing. They invite any parents who feel like giving a hand to go along. It’s a big responsibility, ferrying that number of kids around somewhere like that. I was going to go, but last night Rosie suddenly said, “Why can’t Daddy go? Miss Martindale says it doesn’t just have to be mummies.” Peter, bless his heart, said, why not? He’d like nothing better than a day in the company of his daughter and a hundred other kids. And he rang you and you kindly said that considering how hard you’d been working him for the past hundred years or so, he was long overdue a bit of time off…’
‘Don’t recollect them as my exact words,’ said Dalziel.
‘Peter is one of nature’s paraphrasers. So, nothing for me to do but say, “Great. It’ll give me the chance to get on with some work,” and smile through my tears.’
‘So you worried?’
‘Of course I worried. I worried about what kind of mother I was. And I worried about them out there in the big wide world without me to look after them. And I worried about myself for worrying about them!’
Plus the other worries she wasn’t about to air in front of Novello. Or Dalziel either, for that matter. Or indeed herself if she could help it. Worries like damp patches on a kitchen wall, that you could stand a chair in front of, or hang a wallchart over, or even just ignore, but you knew that sometime you were going to have to deal with them.
‘So I went upstairs, switched my laptop on and started working,’ she concluded.
‘That help with worries, does it?’ He sipped his Scotch and looked at her doubtfully.
Something else she wasn’t going to lay out in present company.
‘The poet Cowper managed to keep religious mania at bay for several decades by dint of writing,’ she said spiritedly.
‘God moves in a mysterious way His wonders to perform,’ said Dalziel, whose capacity to surprise should have ceased to surprise her. ‘Then the doorbell rang?’
‘No. I heard their car and spoke to them out of the window. Then I went downstairs and opened the door.’
‘Oh aye, you said. No print on the bellpush then. Pity.’
‘I’m sorry. I should have thought on.’
He smiled at her sarcasm, then said seriously, ‘When they mentioned Rosie, it must have been right bad.’
‘Bad? It felt like the bottom had fallen out of the universe. It was like getting the worst news you could imagine, and knowing it was all your own fault.’
She spoke with a vehemence which came close to being excessive.
‘All your fault? Nay, luv, can’t see how you could ever think that,’ he said, viewing her closely.
If Dalziel had been by himself, she might have stumbled into an explanation.
Maybe something like, I felt so relieved that morning not to be going with Rosie, to know she was in Peter’s care, to have a day at last when I could stop worrying about her. But not just for her sake, and not even because I could probably do with the rest myself, but because when we nearly lost her, I knew then what I must have known before but never had occasion to look straight in the eye, that my single-handed sailing days were over forever, that I’d been pressed as part of a three-man crew on a lifelong voyage over what were hopefully oceans of absolute love. Except if it’s so absolute, how come there’s a little part of me somewhere which, like Achilles’s heel, didn’t get submerged? Forgive me muddling my metaphors, it’s probably this story I’m writing. But that’s another story. No, what I’m trying to say is, no matter how I try to hide it from myself, there’s something in me that sometimes yearns to be free, that gets nostalgic for the long-lost days of free choice, that comes close to seeing this love I feel not as a gift but as a burden, not as a privilege but a responsibility. Perhaps I’m simply a selfish person who knows now she can never be selfish again. Does anyone else feel like this? Am I a monster? That’s why I was so ready to believe them, that’s why I felt so guilty. It was like God had decided I hadn’t got the message loud and clear last time and I needed another dose of the same to get me straight.
Something like that, maybe. But probably not, even if Novello and her little notebook hadn’t been there.
‘Just a figure of speech, Andy,’ she said.
‘So you’d have gone with this pair?’ asked the Fat Man.
‘Anywhere they wanted. If they’d kept it vague I’d have got in that car and…and what, Andy? What did they want with me?’
‘That’s for them to know and us to find out,’ said Dalziel. ‘So what put you onto them?’
‘I’ve told you!’
‘Aye, but telling’s like peeing to a man with a swollen prostate, you think you’ve got it all out but there’s often a bit more to come.’
‘Who speaks so well should never speak in vain,’ said Ellie. ‘OK. At first I couldn’t think of anything except Rosie being ill again. Then when they said about trying to contact Peter and being told he wasn’t available, I nearly said, of course he wasn’t available because he’s on the coach!’
‘But you didn’t? Why not?’
‘I don’t know. I reckon to start with it was just a case of being too shocked to speak, and that gave me time to think, I suppose. And suddenly it was like fireworks going off in my brain. I found myself thinking, it’s not just Jehovah’s Witnesses that don’t drive thirty thousand pound BMWs. I mean, I know the council tax has gone up, but surely the Education Department doesn’t kit its employees out like this? Sorry. It makes sense to me, I assure you. At the same time I registered that two or three times they said he when they were talking about the head at Edengrove. Now, one thing anyone in our local Ed Department will know is that the head of Edengrove is Miss Martindale. Not to know her argues yourself braindead. So I thought I’d just give them a little test. I made up a Mr Johnson as head teacher. And when they didn’t respond to that, I knew something very funny was going on.’
‘So you decided to assault them?’
‘No. I thought of challenging them, but there were two of them and only one of me and if their purpose was as nefarious as I was beginning to imagine, I didn’t like the odds. Time to retreat and lock the door, I thought.’
‘So what brought out the beast in you?’ asked Dalziel.
‘It was the man. The woman was trying to play it cool, very reassuring, nothing to worry about. She could probably see that I was already sick to guts with worry. But he decided that the more worried I got, the less trouble I’d be, and he said something about getting a move on just in case it turned out to be more serious than they thought. God, that really got to me. I thought, you callous bastard! The woman tried to calm things down, but it was too late. I was so angry that I must have been the best advert for gun control you ever saw. Because if I’d had one, I would have shot him, no problem.’
‘Not then,’ said Dalziel. ‘Might have had one now, but. On the other hand, we’d have had a body to work on. Nowt like a body when you’re short of a lead.’
‘Are you saying you’d rather I’d killed one of them?’
He considered.
‘No,’ he said finally. ‘Gets boring interrogating corpses. Serious wound, but, now that would have been nice. Something that would need hospital treatment. How hard did you say you kneed him?’
‘I shouldn’t think he’ll be troubling his wife for a few nights, but I doubt if he’d go for treatment.’
‘Wife? You reckon he was married?’ said Dalziel casually.
‘Well, he wore a big gold ring on his wedding finger… Andy, that was clever. I’d forgotten that. I mean, I didn’t think I’d noticed that.’
‘Not all rubber-truncheon work down the nick. Anything else come to mind, apart from what you scribbled down?’
He looked at the piece of paper Ellie had scribbled her notes on.
‘Man was six feet,’ he read. ‘About thirty – slim build – light-brown hair – bushy – needed a cut – left-hand parting – brown eyes, I think – not blue – squarish face – open honest expression – God the bastards were good!…’
He looked enquiringly at Ellie.
‘Yeah, sorry about that.’
‘Nay, it’s useful what you felt. By good, you mean…?’
‘Saying they were with the Education Welfare Service. That’s the council department that helps deal with problems like absenteeism, truancy, bullying, parental complaint, anything that a school finds it can’t cope with internally. But what I mean is, at first they came over perfect for it. Nice, caring, positive people…’
‘Bumbling do-gooders, you mean? Sorry. Just trying to put it in terms my lads would understand. Clothing – suit – Prince of Wales check – light-blue shirt – blue and yellow diagonal striped tie – could have been Old Boys or a club – on his feet dark-brown sandals…’
‘Did I put that? No, he was wearing a sort of soft leather moccasin, no laces, dark-tan, casual but elegant, in fact, they looked rather expensive, come to think of it. Which is what you’ve made me do, you cunning sod. I never mentioned sandals!’
Dalziel grinned.
‘No. You put nowt. But shoes are important. Change everything else, but you want your feet to stay comfy.’
‘So if he changes into something else because he’s worried that I can describe him, he might keep the same shoes on?’
‘Aye, but don’t get excited. Not the kind of info we pass on to Interpol. Voice – light-baritone range – Irish accent…’
‘No, that one’s not going to work, Andy,’ said Ellie firmly. ‘I said no distinguishable accent, and that’s what I mean.’
‘So not a Yorkshireman.’
‘Not like you, no.’
‘Not deep and musical then. But there’s all sorts of Yorkshire voices. There’s that high squeaky one, like yon journalist fellow who used to shovel shit for Maggie Thatcher. And there’s that one like a circular saw –’
‘No, not northern at all,’ interrupted Ellie.
‘So, not northern and not Irish. We’re getting somewhere. Scottish? Welsh? Cockney? The Queen? Michael Caine? Maurice Chevalier?’
‘You’re getting silly. No, he didn’t have any accent at all, really. Like an announcer on Radio Four.’
‘You think Radio Four announcers don’t have accents?’ said Dalziel. ‘No, hang about, I think I’m with you. It’s you you think doesn’t have an accent! What you mean is this guy spoke the same way you do? Middle-class posh, but not so much it gets up your nose.’
Ellie, faced as so often with a choice between laughing at Andy Dalziel or thumping him, decided she’d been involved in enough violence for the day and laughed.
‘Yes, I suppose that is what I do mean,’ she said.
‘Grand. Now the woman. How’s she for injury, by the way?’
‘She might have a black eye, and a few scratches,’ said Ellie, thinking affectionately of the Pompon de Paris. ‘Hey, and there could be a few threads from her dress hooked on the rose bush by the front door.’
‘We’ll check. So. Age thirties – five-eight or -nine – dark eyes – long face – not bad-looking – expensive make-up –what’s the difference between expensive and not so expensive?’
‘The more you pay, the less you see.’
‘Like sending your kids to public school. Hair black – natural – short – classy stylist – I won’t ask – build slim – good figure – there’s that good again. Know what I mean by good, but what’s it signify to you?’
Ellie threw an exasperated glance at Shirley Novello who returned it blankly.
‘Well, I’m sure that to you, Andy, a good figure suggests something like two footballs in a gunny bag, but what I mean is something you can see’s there but all in proportion, back, front, and middle, OK?’
‘Like you, you mean?’ said Dalziel, looking at her appreciatively. ‘In fact, sounds a lot like you, except mebbe for the expensive make-up. Joke. Now, clothing – olive-green cotton dress – sleeveless – leather shoulder bag – no stockings – pale-green sling-back shoes. Was she married?’
Ellie thought then said, ‘Yes, she was wearing a wedding ring. And she had a ring on her right-hand middle finger too. Green stone. Plus a wristwatch. Expanding bracelet, gold, I think. Sorry, I should have put that down.’
‘You’re doing fine. The watch on the same hand as the ring?’
‘Yes. The right. Hey, that means…’
‘She could be left-handed. That’s summat. Voice husky – accent Midlandish. Birmingham? Wolverhampton? Black Country?’
‘Any. It was just a patina, so to speak, not a full-blown accent.’
‘Might have made it to Radio Four, eh? Hello, here comes Smiler again.’
Wield had re-entered the room.
He said, ‘We’ve got Peter,’ and handed Ellie the mobile phone, then looked at Dalziel and jerked his head doorwards, suggesting they leave.
The Fat Man yawned, scratched his nose and poured himself another Scotch.
‘Peter! Yes, yes, I’m fine, really… And you two… that’s great, I knew you would be, but I just wanted to hear it from your own lips… Wieldy’s told you all about it, I’m sure… honestly, no harm done… Well, you’ll guess I was a bit shook up at first, but once I realized it was just a stupid jape… what else could it be?… No, no, don’t do that. I don’t want Rosie worried. Just carry on, enjoy the rest of the day… I’m fine, really… no, I won’t be on my own, and you’re not due back late… give my love to Rose… and you too… yes, I will, I do… yes, he’s here. ’Bye, darling.’
She handed the phone to Dalziel, then bowed her head and let out a deep breath as she relaxed from the effort of keeping her feelings in check. The temptation to let it all flood out as soon as she heard Peter’s voice had been very strong, which was probably why the fat bastard had stayed in the room. She looked up to find Wield watching her, and jerked her head at him in a mirror image of his own gesture, then led him outside.
‘Well, that’s a relief,’ she said in the hall.
Novello had followed them out. Dalziel must have dismissed her. All right for her to hear me spilling my guts, but not to eavesdrop on his conversation with Peter, thought Ellie.
‘You’re looking a lot better,’ said Wield.
‘Yes? Well, I suppose a lot of that’s down to Andy, though I hate to say it. He’s…’
‘Good?’ offered Wield.
‘Let’s not go overboard. He’s subtler than I imagined. In a very unsubtle way, of course. So what happens now, Wieldy? You all go away and start to wonder if maybe it wasn’t just an over-reaction by a hysterical woman after all?’
‘No. We go away and don’t rest till we find out what’s been going on here.’
‘Any ideas in the pipeline?’
She saw Novello’s brow crinkle as if she might have something to say, but before she could speak, if that were her intention, Wield said very firmly, ‘No.’
Ellie looked into that violently contoured face in which nothing was readable except the affection in his eyes and wondered if the No was a lie or the truth.
And which of them would she find more comfort in?
iv
spelt from Sibyl’s leaves (#ulink_a47fc7d3-e3fb-57c7-92e4-48ff878d854a)
Edgar Wield…
Edgar Wield…
biking through the glen…
Poof.
Perve.
Shirtlifter.
Arse bandit.
All these and more figured in Gaw Sempernel’s brief remarks when he dropped by in person to tell me to add Sergeant Wield to his current operational folder which, with what he probably sees as subtle wit, he has christened Sibyl’s Leaves.
It’s not often Gaw and I meet face to face these days.
Well, not face to face exactly, he towering, I at wheelchair level, his eyes never meeting mine direct, mine looking straight at his immaculately tailored crotch.
If I reached out and touched him, how would he react?
Not, I suspect, as once I could make him react just by smiling and moistening my lips at him across a crowded committee room.
‘Reasons for inclusion?’ I asked him.
Because I say so, hovered in the air between us.
Then the famous Sempernel diplomacy clicked in and he said, ‘Close associate of Dalziel and Pascoe, very friendly with Eleanor Pascoe, lives with Edwin Digweed, former solicitor, struck off shortly after qualifying when he was convicted of committing an act of gross indecency with a gentleman whose voice is now listened to with great attention when he speaks from, appropriately enough, the cross-benches in the Upper Chamber. It was theorized at the time by our masters that, had not the case become public, it might have been a prelude to long-term political blackmail.’
‘Grounds?’ I asked, fingers poised.
‘Irrelevant now,’ he said dismissively. ‘Point is, here we have a policeman whose private life makes him vulnerable. The only way he’s been able to survive is with the protection of his superiors, and we would be wise, I’m sure you’ll agree, to ask ourselves why that has been given.’
‘You’re not suggesting that Superintendent Dalziel and DCI Pascoe are gay?’ I exclaimed.
‘If they were, that would make things simple,’ he said pompously. ‘It is the fact that they probably are not that I find sinister.’
You find friendship sinister, I thought. Oh, Gaw!
‘In any case, the sergeant’s sexual orientation is no longer a matter of law,’ I said.
‘Sexual orientation?’ he mocked. ‘You have been too long immersed in the obliquities of Sibylline utterance. Let us call a spade a spade.’
And then came out the long list of mocking insults.
Oh Gaw, I thought. What indignities did you suffer at that school of yours to make you so vehement? Or perhaps the question should be, what ecstasies did you experience which make you feel so guilty?
But nothing I said.
Mine is not to reason why, or at least not to be seen reasoning why.
Mine is merely to obey orders and collect here all those whom Gaw Sempernel sees fit to designate as leaves on his tree.
Edgar Wield…
Edgar Wield…
Most inscrutable of men…
Working-class background. Can’t have been easy growing up feeling as you did in a Yorkshire mining village, son of a lurcher-loving, pigeon-fancying father, with the pit gaping at your feet and the only traditional ways out university for the very bright or professional Rugby League for the very brawny.
You were neither, Edgar, but you found a third way which, though it attracted the contumely of your peers, diverted their suspicion from the truth of you.
The police.
Were you perhaps still trying to convince yourself that it was, as they used to say, only a phase? That given the right environment you’d wake up one day and say to yourself, what I really fancy is finding a willing lass and giving her a right good shagging?
Or were you looking for a job where most people see only the uniform, never the man?
You were good at the job.
Not ivory tower university bright perhaps, but sharply focused with a phenomenal memory and a huge capacity for marshalling intricate detail, you took all the police exams in your stride, you won commendations for bravery, your annual reviews were undiluted paeans, you looked set to rise high. But once you became sergeant in the CID, you remained fixed.
Not for you the exposure of high rank.
You enjoy what you are doing. You are good at it. And your association with those other two who have also come fluttering down into Sempernel’s leaves, Dalziel and Pascoe, has given you confidence enough to live your life more freely, not to flaunt who you are but not to hide it either.
And still Gaw Sempernel suspects you.
Or at least feels he might at some point be able to use you.
From what I know of you, lying here in my little casket, Sergeant, this may not be the least of his errors.
loved by his friends…
refusing to yield…
Edgar Wield…
Edgar Wield…
v (#ulink_5bbaec00-bbcb-5596-b2c6-a6950a936b58)
revenge and retribution (#ulink_5bbaec00-bbcb-5596-b2c6-a6950a936b58)
Every age has its own defining philosophical speculations, often best expressed in terms which may at a glance appear over-personalized and tainted with self-interest.
It was, for example, in relation to her prospects of professional advancement that Shirley Novello first asked herself the question, was being treated like a man a form of sexual discrimination?
Things had seemed pretty straightforward the first time she had attended a CID gathering in the Black Bull with the Holy Trinity and found she was expected to go to the bar and collect the drinks no matter who was actually buying the round. She was disappointed without being surprised, as this chimed perfectly with the expectation at all levels in the Force that if tea or coffee were to be fetched, any woman present would be the fetcher. Novello had worked out various non-confrontational strategems to avoid doing this, but she had not been afraid to fall back on confrontation.
Confrontation with Andy Dalziel, however, felt as futile as confrontation with Uranus. (Or any planet, but Uranus somehow seemed most fitting.) Hit it hard as you could, you weren’t going to jolt it out of its orbit.
The other two, however, gave the impression that they might in their better moments be susceptible to the nudge of right reason.
But before she could nerve herself to put this to the test, she had discovered by distant observation that if the group consisted of the Trinity alone, it was usually Wield who did the fetching and carrying, while if the three became a pair, it was Pascoe.
So now right reason asked, if a male sergeant and a male chief inspector could accept this as the natural order of things, was it reasonable for a female constable to cry discrimination?
Or, to put it another way, what should a woman do who fought for equal treatment and then found that the equal treatment she fought for was in fact unequal?
These were the speculations thronging her mind as she returned from the bar at eleven o’clock on the morning after the attempted kidnapping of Ellie Pascoe, bearing a tray loaded with a pint of best, a half of the same, a fizzy mineral water and a Coke.
Pascoe’s request for the mineral water had emboldened her to buy the Coke.
They were in the Black Bull to discuss possible ramifications of yesterday’s events. The chief inspector had arrived late at the station, having spent the morning ensuring that his house and Edengrove School were being watched over to his satisfaction. He looked worn out, and it was this wanness which the Fat Man had used as an excuse to retire instantly to the pub where, he averred, he had his best thoughts, and they would be free from interruption. Novello’s inclusion had had all the appearance of a throwaway afterthought, coming as Dalziel led the trio out of the CID room. But Novello had long since concluded that most of the Fat Man’s apparent afterthoughts were carefully planned. The wise thing was to be neither flattered by his attention nor offended by the lack of it.
She placed the tray on the table, noting with some satisfaction that she’d managed to slop a little beer over Dalziel’s change (the seriousness of the occasion was marked by the fact that Dalziel had actually bought a round), and then put all personal and philosophical considerations out of her mind to focus on the debate in progress.
The on-the-table theory was that the attempted abduction had something to do with Pascoe’s work.
‘Wieldy, you were trawling that mind of thine for folk Pete’s put away who were nutty enough to take it personally.’
Dalziel’s natural Luddism was expressed in his boast, ‘Who needs great ugly lumps of hi-tech equipment cluttering the place when we’ve got Wieldy who’s twice as efficient and three times as ugly?’ but Novello had noticed that the sergeant’s computer skills were state of the art.
Whatever its source, the list of perps who’d gone down threatening the DCI with personal injury was impressively long. For a nice quiet guy, Pascoe seemed to have got up a lot of criminal noses.
But Wield’s conclusion was that in most cases the threats had just been empty, if over-heated, air.
‘You need a special kind of twist to nurse a grievance and plan revenge,’ said Wield.
‘Is that right, Sigmund?’ said Dalziel. ‘So what you’re saying is, you’ve dug deep and ended up with nowt but an empty hole?’
‘No,’ said Wield. ‘In fact, I struck a root. Franny Roote.’
Dalziel looked blank for a moment, then let his jaw drop in the mock-amazement he had taken to affecting if Wield essayed a joke.
‘You mean that weird student at yon college? My memory serves me right, we couldn’t do him for owt but being an accessory.’
‘That’s right,’ said Wield. ‘But after listening to what had gone on there, the judge ordered a psycho-evaluation before sentencing. And after getting an earful of that, he decided best place for Roote was a secure hospital. To start with the lad refused all treatment, and during this period he seems to have fixed on the DCI, or sergeant as he was then, as the man responsible for putting him there. He seemed to think you had something personal against him.’
‘I know it’s silly, but I do tend to feel strongly about people who try to kill me,’ said Pascoe. ‘I recall I got a weird letter from him while he was waiting trial. I passed it on to the court, so in a way he was right about me helping to get him certified. But there’s been nothing since. I haven’t thought about him for years.’
‘Doesn’t mean he’s not been thinking about you,’ said Dalziel. ‘Wieldy, I take it there’s summat else.’
‘Only that he finally accepted the treatment and settled down to being a model patient-cum-prisoner. Did an OU degree in English Literature, and went on to start a research course for a Ph.D. or some such thing. Finally he convinced them he wasn’t a menace to society any more and got himself discharged. Last month.’
There was a moment’s silence, then the Fat Man said, ‘That it?’
‘Except…’
‘What?’
‘He’d know Ellie, she was teaching at the college then, wasn’t she? When you met her.’
Pascoe nodded.
‘So?’ said Dalziel.
‘Nothing. Just a connection,’ said Wield. ‘Also, probably means nowt, but this research he’s doing. His topic is, I made a note of it, aye, here it is… Revenge and Retribution in English Drama.’
Another silence, then Dalziel said, ‘Beats sewing mailbags and breaking rocks, I suppose. Got an address?’
‘Aye. Sheffield.’
‘Not so far, then. Set up liaison with South Yorkshire, then pop down there in the morning and check him out.’
‘Can’t do it tomorrow, sir. Day off.’
‘Oh aye? And what are you doing that’s more important than finding out who’s threatening your colleague’s family, Sergeant?’ demanded Dalziel in that tone of high moral dudgeon he saved for underlings who dared suggest they had a private life.
Wield glanced at Pascoe, who said, ‘Actually, Wieldy is very kindly entertaining that same colleague’s family. He’s invited Ellie and Rosie out to Enscombe to look round the Children’s Zoo at the Hall.’
‘Oh,’ said Dalziel, slightly flummoxed. ‘Right. That’s fine. Only don’t try putting it down as overtime. Best go to check Roote out yourself then, Pete. If you feel up to it.’
‘It’ll be a pleasure,’ said Pascoe. ‘I’m in court with Kelly Cornelius at twelve, but that should give me plenty of time.’
Shirley Novello listened and learned. These three had a pretty cosy relationship, she thought. Though perhaps cosy was not a word that fitted well on anything to do with Andy Dalziel. But they meshed easily together, like well-oiled cog wheels. It was a piece of machinery she’d like to get herself linked up with, but she recognized the dangers in trying to poke yourself too brutally among moving cogs.
She’d noted with interest the reference to Ellie Pascoe’s job way back in the dark ages when they’d met. A college lecturer. Queen of the kids in never-never land. That figured.
‘Right,’ said Dalziel. ‘That’s revenge took care of. Let’s move on. Cases in progress where your involvement in the prosecution could make it seem worthwhile to some no-brain wanker to get you by the goolies. How’s that look?’
Pascoe winced at the language, then sent an irritatingly apologetic glance to Novello, who winced, less obviously, in her turn. Hadn’t marriage to the Nutcracker Fairy taught him anything?
Wield shrugged and said, ‘Nothing obvious. Any road, I’d have thought they saved threats for civilians. Cops they’d offer a bung.’
‘Yeah, you and me, mebbe, Wieldy. But every sod knows fancy pants here’s incorruptible. So, tell us, Mother Teresa, is there owt you’re working on that gives you that funny feeling you’re famous for?’
Pascoe, with more than his customary diffidence, said, ‘Well, it is just a feeling, but for some reason I keep on thinking Kelly Cornelius.’
‘Her!’ cried Dalziel in derision. ‘She’s a lass, not to mention a sodding accountant. You’ve got more chance of getting aggro from a Siamese waitress.’
Putting aside this touchstone of timidity for future deconstruction, Pascoe said, ‘She is actually being charged with assault on a police officer, don’t forget.’
‘Oh aye, but that were Hector, and usually they give you a medal for thumping him,’ said Dalziel. ‘Any road, why should she want to frighten you off? You’re just keeping her on ice on this assault charge while the Fraud boys get their act together, isn’t that the arrangement? They’re the ones who are going to send her down for ten years when they finally get their fingers out. What’s going off there, anyway, Pete? I don’t mind helping out, but won’t tomorrow be the third time you’ve had to go along and ask for a further remand in custody? And what’s Desperate Dan know that we don’t?’
Desperate Dan was Dan Trimble, Mid-Yorkshire’s Chief Constable, who in Dalziel’s eyes didn’t need to know anything other than how to pour single malt without missing the glass whenever the Head of CID graced him with his presence.
‘If I knew that, then he wouldn’t,’ said Pascoe. ‘OK, I’m just concerned with the assault charge, but that’s what’s keeping her remanded in custody. Two possibilities. One, some accomplice wants her loose so that she can do a runner. Someone at the bank, maybe, who’s afraid if this goes on much longer, she’s going to start pointing the finger.’
‘Someone like who?’
‘Well, I gather Fraud are looking very closely at her immediate boss, George Ollershaw. They’ve got nothing definite yet, but you can tell they’re sniffing the air.’
‘Ollershaw? Him? Nay, he’s a right banker, and like most on ’em can probably play a fair tune on the fiddle, but I can’t see him getting mixed up with owt violent.’
‘Know him, do you, sir?’
‘I’ve seen him down the Gents. And heard him too, sounding off to his mates. Big I Am, but a long way off Mr Big, I’d say.’
The Gents, as Novello had learned after an embarrassing misunderstanding, wasn’t a lavatorial reference but a popular shortening of the Borough Club for Professional Gentlemen, the Athenaeum of the North, an exclusive social and dining club, men only, of course, which made Novello think that perhaps her misunderstanding wasn’t. When she’d wondered to Wield why someone as anarchically unclubbable as Dalziel should have joined such an organization, the sergeant had replied, ‘Cos they didn’t want him, of course.’
‘All the same, I think they’ve still got him in the frame,’ said Pascoe. ‘But there’s another possibility. One way of looking at it, the prime target for intimidation is Kelly herself. Until the Fraud Squad get a line on the Nortrust Bank money, it’s floating around somewhere in cyberspace, and she may be the only one who can get at it. So maybe someone wants her out so they can use methods that even Fraud draw the line at to get her to tell where it is.’
It seemed to Novello that the DCI was putting forward his Cornelius hypotheses with more stubbornness than conviction.
Dalziel clearly thought so too. He said, ‘Doesn’t make sense. Anyone serious could easily get to her in the remand centre, bend her over a table and threaten to shove a broken bottle up her jacksie, happens all the time.’
‘That’s fine if what you want to find out is where the swag’s buried, but it’s not like that here,’ insisted Pascoe. ‘OK, it’s easy enough to get some prison hardcase to do the job for a couple of rocks, but what’s Kelly going to tell her? Nothing that makes any sense, I’d bet. No, it could be the only way to get at this loot is to sit Kelly down in front of a state-of-the-art computer and make her an offer she can’t refuse. To do that, you want her out of custody. All they’d need from me is to make our opposition to her reapplication for bail tomorrow a bit feeble.’
Dalziel snorted doubt and provoked Wield into a display of loyalty.
‘Makes sense to me,’ he said. ‘Twisting Pete’s arm to perjure himself is one thing. Bloody hard to do, and harder to get away with ’cos everyone in the job would sit up and take notice if suddenly his evidence changed. But subtly getting up some magistrate’s nose so as he grants bail just to show who’s in charge of the courts here, that would be dead easy. And not such a strain on the conscience either.’
‘Oh aye? You’d do it, would you, if that antique bookie of thine were threatened?’ said Dalziel.
Antiquarian book dealer, corrected Novello mentally, watching with the keenness of an ambitious student to see how Wield would react to this reference to his partner.
‘Straight choice between Edwin and a crook, no problem,’ said Wield without hesitation, looking the Fat Man right in the eye.
‘Well, bugger me,’ said Dalziel. ‘Thank God there’s thee and me left with some moral fibre, Ivor, and I’m not so sure about thee. You’re keeping very quiet for a lass. Didn’t your trip to the wishing well get you any ideas?’
‘Wishing well?’ echoed Novello uncertainly.
‘Aye, I take it that’s where tha tossed my change,’ said Dalziel, poking at the wet coins with his forefinger. ‘Only, when I were young, you had to leave it there to get any results.’
‘I can take it back and get some more drink if you like, sir,’ said Novello sweetly.
‘Nay, it’s some other bugger’s shout,’ said Dalziel, closing his fingers round the money, shaking it dry, and thrusting it into his pocket. ‘And while we’re waiting for Mr and Mrs Alzheimer here to remember the way to their wallets, why don’t you give us the benefit of female intuition, Ivor? Or are you only here for the beer?’
You tell me, fatso! thought Novello. But even as she fought the impulse to tip the remnants of her Coke over his great grizzled head, the answer came to her in that curious admixture of gratification and indignation which was her frequent response to Dalziel.
She was here not because he fancied her or wanted someone to fetch the beer; she was here because he simply reckoned she could make a useful contribution.
She looked around. Like Mrs Robinson, all she could see were sympathetic eyes. Well, four anyway. The Fat Man’s expression was one of confident expectation, like a ringmaster watching a performing pig. Bastard.
She said, ‘Well, there was one thing that did occur to me about what happened yesterday…’
‘Spit it out, lass, afore I die of thirst.’
‘What if you, that is we, are all barking up the wrong tree? What if it’s got nothing whatsoever to do with the DCI and the people he’s put away or is trying to put away? What if in fact it’s all to do with Ellie, Mrs Pascoe, herself?’
Silence fell and the three men looked at each other with a wild surmise, though Novello feared it had more to do with her sanity than her insight.
Then the phone behind the bar rang and Jack Mahoney, the landlord, after listening a moment, called, ‘Are you buggers here?’
Dalziel said, ‘How many times do you need telling to put your mitt over the mouthpiece first, you thick sod? Ivor.’
For once Novello felt nothing but relief at being appointed gofer.
She went to the phone, identified herself, and listened.
Then she looked towards the waiting men.
‘Well?’ said Dalziel. ‘Have I won the lottery, or wha’?’
But it was to Pascoe that Novello addressed herself, trying and failing to sound neutrally official.
‘Sir,’ she said. ‘It’s Seymour. It’s lousy reception, but there’s been more trouble at your house. I’m sorry, but I think he said he’s following an ambulance to the hospital.’
vi
citizen’s arrest
Ellie Pascoe hadn’t realized just how shaken up she still was until the doorbell startled her so much she knocked a fortunately almost empty cup of coffee over her computer.
Get back to normal, she’d told herself, and then recalled that this was also what she’d told herself after Rosie’s illness and had soon come to an understanding that normal wasn’t just a sequence of repeated activities, but a condition like virginity which could never be regained.
But she’d followed the pattern of her normal day, retreating (a nice religious word for what sometimes felt like a nice religious activity) to the boxroom which she refused to call a study. Real writers had studies and you weren’t a real writer till you got something published. Well, she had hopes. The rejection of her third attempt at a novel might have driven her to despair had it not come at the time of Rosie’s illness when despair wasn’t a place she had any desire to visit, and certainly not for the sake of anything as unimportant as a sodding book!
As Rosie started to recover, Ellie had started to write again, but just as her daughter seemed in her play to have turned away from the games of imagination which had once been her favourite territory, so the mother now found herself toying with characters and situations from long ago rather than the snapshot here-and-now realism she’d hitherto thought of as her forte.
She’d pursued this new line without questioning, even after she realized that it wasn’t likely to lead to anything she could submit for publication. But it was… fun? Yes, it was certainly that. But, like the fun of children, like child’s play, it was learning also. Here was something important to her at that time in those circumstances, but also in other times and future circumstance maybe. During her previous existence as a lecturer, a colleague who ran a Creative Writing course had moaned to her that he spent far too much time dealing with the hang-ups of students who clearly regarded narrative fiction as a branch of therapy rather than a branch of art. Now she knew what he meant. Therapy you kept to yourself. Art took you, trembling, in front of the footlights.
She brought this perspective to bear on her rejected third novel. Suddenly she found herself asking paragraph by paragraph the two essential questions. Is this really so important to me I’ve got tosay it? Is this potentially so interesting to readers, they’ll have to read it?
And for a whole week without saying anything to Peter or anyone else, she had launched a savage attack upon her holy script, like Moses going at the tablets with a sledgehammer. The result had been… she had no idea what the result had been, except that before, the book had read clever and now it felt like it read true. A deep distress has humanized my soul…? Well, maybe. Three days ago she’d sent it off to the publisher who’d rejected its previous manifestation. Her accompanying note said, Last time you said it showed promise but… So tell me what it shows now. Only this time I’d appreciate it if you told me quick!
And then she’d returned to the therapy of her tale of old, parodic, far-off things and battles long ago. Self-indulgence is the novelist’s greatest sin, but here she could indulge herself to her heart’s, and her head’s, content. Here she could mock, mimic, talk dirty, wax sentimental, be anarchic, anachronistic, anything she wanted. Here she had power without responsibility, for she was writing solely for herself. No one else was going to read this. She ruled alone in this world, its normalities were whatever she made them. Or, to put it rather less grandiloquently, this was her comfort blanket she could pick up and chew whenever her fragile sensibilities felt the need. So that’s what she called it in her computer. Comfort Blanket. It was still unfinished but so what? The real pleasure was being able to go back over it again and again, changing things, trying new things out.
Nice if life were like that, she thought as she switched on her laptop. Call it up, click on Edit, and cut, copy, find, replace, delete…
Her words suddenly came from nowhere to fill the screen. She smiled. To her essentially non-technological mind, it was still magic.
Now where had she got up to in her revision? Oh yes. There it was.
Chapter 2
As they came down from the headland, the storm died, not a belly-wound death, but quick as an arrow through the heart. One moment the wind off the sea threatened to whirl them along with the racing tatters of low grey cloud, the next the air was still and balmy and the full moon, riding in a star-studded sky, lit the camp site below like a thousand lanterns.
Hadn’t she used that simile before? So what? Homer used his stock images over and over. Get obsessed with novelty and you ended up with a wardrobe full of lovely clothes you could never wear again.
Here, those so tired that they’d slept despite the howling wind were now aroused by the sudden silence. Men began to busy themselves drying offthe weapons and armour which had got soaked in the storm, while the women started building up the tiny fires which were all they’d dared kindle in face of the gale. But all activity stopped as they became aware of the approaching procession.
The Greek came first, his hands bound behind his back and the guard commander’s sword resting lightly against his neck. For all that, he managed to look like a returning traveller greeting old friends, head held high, teeth showing bright through the tangle of beard as he smiled this way and that, nose wrinkling appreciatively at the smell of cooking already arising from one or two fires.
But his eyes were never still, drinking in every detail of the camp.
Bringing up the rear was the wounded guard. He gripped his bleeding left wrist tightly with his right hand and his face showed white as moonlight beneath the weather-beaten skin.
‘What’s up, mate?’ called someone.
‘Bloody Greek spy. Nearly took my fucking hand off. Bastard!’
‘That right? Don’t worry, we’ll chop more than his hand off before we’re finished.’
The guard commander said mildly, ‘Glad to see you’re so keen for action, soldier. You can take over up the headland. Go on, don’t hang about. Could be there’s a whole army of Greeks landing there already.’
The word Greeks buzzed quickly through the camp, and soon the way ahead was blocked bya crowd of men, many with their weapons out. Unperturbed, the prisoner advanced at the same steady pace, forcing them to retreat before him, till someone at the rear set up a cry of, ‘The Prince! The Prince!’ and the men moved to either side, leaving a path clear.
Two men had emerged from the sole substantial shelter in the camp, a small pavilion erected in the lee of a huge boulder which had shielded it from the worst of the storm. One was grey-bearded and bent with the weight of years, the other young, slim, upright, with still, watchful eyes set in a narrow clean-shaven face.
Suddenly the fat man sank to his knees and prostrated himself with his face pressed against the young man’s sandals.
‘Have mercy, great Prince,’ his muffled voice pleaded. ‘Like the gods you are clearly descended from, take pity on this poor miserable wretch whose only hope for life and succour lies in your infinite generosity.’
The young man didn’t look impressed.
‘What’s this you’ve brought us, Achates?’ he asked.
Succinctly the guard commander told his story.
‘So, a Greek, you say? And probably a spy?’
A cry of protest rose from the recumbent man, cut off sharply as Achates pressed the point of his sword into his neck.
‘Could be. Shall I set him on a griddle over a slow fire for half an hour till he’s ready to tell us?’
A murmur of approval went up from the listening men, but the Prince said gravely, ‘This is not how our religion has taught us to treat the wayworn traveller who comes as a guest in our midst. Let food and dry clothing be brought, and when he is refreshed, I shall talk to him to discover what manner of man he is and his purpose in coming here.’
The fat man began to gabble fulsome thanks, but the Prince silenced him with a sharp movement of his foot and went on, ‘Nevertheless, heat up the griddle in case I am not satisfied.’
The Prince disengaged his foot and Achates prodded the Greek upright with his sword. Two young women came forward, one with some clothing, the other with a bronze platter piled high with steaming food.
‘That smells grand. I’m right grateful, lord. Only I need a hand to eat with.’
‘Only one?’ said Achates, raising his weapon. ‘Which would you like to keep?’
‘Nay, not so hasty,’ said the Greek, starting back. ‘Hang about.’
He flexed his broad shoulders, took a deep breath, bowed forward, his body hunched, and with a single convulsive movement, he snapped the length of cloth which bound his wrists.
At this moment the doorbell rang and Ellie, dragged back from the dangerous world of her imagination to the equally dangerous world of her life, knocked over the cup.
‘Fuck!’ she said, jumping up and shaking the coffee from the keyboard.
Amazingly, when she finished, the screen still displayed her story but for safety’s sake she saved and switched off.
The doorbell was ringing again.
Even the knowledge that Detective Constable Dennis Seymour was sitting in his car right opposite the house didn’t prevent her from checking on the bellringer from behind the curtains like any suburban housewife in a sitcom.
It was her friend, Daphne Aldermann, full of eager curiosity after having been intercepted and checked out by the watching policeman. After a short hiatus to pour herself and her guest a nerve-soothing Scotch – once you got on Dr Dalziel’s books, you followed his prescriptions to the bitter end – she had launched into the narrative with mock-heroic gusto, and thence to the calmer pleasures of self-analysis. As a long-time opponent of all forms of violent action, she felt it necessary to explain in detail to Daphne, who had no objection whatsoever to a bit of violence in a good cause, what had provoked her to physical assault.
‘It was using Rosie that did it,’ she said. ‘It was my own guilt feelings that really exploded, I suppose.’
‘Your guilt feelings?’
Daphne wasn’t Dalziel and she certainly wasn’t that nebby infant, Novello.
She gave her a version of the confession she’d rehearsed when talking to the Fat Man, ending with, ‘So you see what a mixed-up cow I’ve turned into. I feel like that base Indian – in Hamlet, is it? –who threw away the pearl richer than all his tribe. Only I got it back.’
‘Othello, I think. And the point was he had no idea that what he’d got had any value at all. And you didn’t throw Rosie away anyway,’ said Daphne Aldermann sensibly. ‘And you’ve always been a mixed-up cow, so no change there.’
It was, she felt, in her relationship with Ellie Pascoe, her avocation to be sensible. In upbringing, outlook and circumstance, the two women were light years apart. But the mad scientist of chance had chosen to set their opposing particles on a collision course some years earlier, and while a great deal of energy had been released, it had been through fusion rather than fission.
Ellie looked ready to meet her head-on in battle, but in the end diverted to a minor skirmish.
‘You sure it’s Othello?’ she said truculently. ‘I thought the nearest you privately educated lot got to literature was carrying the Collected Works on your head during deportment lessons.’
‘You’re forgetting. They made us learn a classic each morning between the cross-country run and the first cold shower,’ said Daphne. ‘So OK, something bad happens to our kids, we feel responsible. Mothers are programmed that way. Or conditioned – let’s not get into that argument.’
‘I know that. But knowing doesn’t stop you feeling. And being shocked how much you feel. Why ever I did it, I still can’t believe I actually assaulted those people.’
‘Oh, come on,’ said Daphne, with all the ease of a natural supporter of corporal and capital punishment. ‘They had it coming. God knows what they were going to do with you, but if they get caught, probably they’ll get off with writing a hundred lines and probation. At least as he smiles at you out of the dock, you’ll be able to think, I left my mark on you, mate!’
Ellie laughed and refilled their glasses. It had been one of the mad scientist’s better ideas to have Daphne call round that morning. As soon as she saw her, Ellie realized that of all her friends, here was the one best suited to the circumstances. With Daphne she could get serious without getting heavy, and her different world view provided a stimulating, if sometimes infuriating, change of perspective.
They drank and Daphne said, ‘So, how’s Rosie? Did she get a whiff of all the excitement?’
‘We tried to keep it from her, but you never know what they pick up, do you? I was tempted to keep her off school today, but that would have confirmed there was something going on. Anyway, the holidays start tomorrow, and she made such a fuss about getting back after her illness, she’d have been brokenhearted to miss the fun of the last day.’
‘Children’s hearts are made of one of the least frangible materials known to man,’ said Daphne with a mother-of-two’s certainty. ‘Especially girls’. I seem to recall breaking mine on an almost daily basis but somehow surviving without resort to Dr Christian Barnard. You too, I bet.’
‘Perhaps. I never lost my best friend when I was Rosie’s age, but,’ said Ellie.
There’d been two girls stricken by the meningitis bug. The other, Rosie’s classmate and best friend, Zandra, had died.
Daphne grimaced and said, ‘I was forgetting that. Sorry. It’s funny, a child’s grief, unless you’ve experienced it yourself, you don’t think about it much… but she was keen to get back to Edengrove, you say? I’d have thought…’
‘Me too. We’ve talked about Zandra, naturally. Or rather I’ve talked. Rosie listens. But she doesn’t say much beyond, the nix got her. You remember the nix? The water-imp in that book she used to be crazy about, whose hobby was abducting young girls? The educational psych, who looks about fifteen and has a stutter, says I shouldn’t worry, in fact I should be pleased Rosie’s found a formula which enables her to deal with her loss. Like she’s bottling it up, you mean? I said. Like she’s dealing with it, says this adolescent expert firmly. She’ll talk when she wants to talk, just leave the channels open. Just try to let things settle back to what they were before. Routines are more than comfortable, they are essential. Christ, I reckon she must have majored on The Little Book of Psycho-pap or some such thing!’
‘You didn’t actually say that, did you?’
Ellie laughed and said, ‘No. I’m getting soft. In fact, I came home and dug out Nina and the Nix from where I’d hidden it, then I had a drink and a think, and then I went and hid it again. In other words, I’ve no idea how to cope. So I decided to go with the flow and when Rosie wanted to go back to school, I said, OK, why not?’
‘That sounds sensible.’
‘Yeah, except I did start wondering if it was just a way of getting out from under this madwoman who’d turned from a straightforward modern laissez-faire mum to an overbearing, over-anxious, ever-present earth mother. OK. No need to say it. That’s me all over. Self-centred. Everything comes back to me.’
‘You said it. But everything includes all the pain and worry too, so don’t whip yourself too hard with them scorpions.’
‘My, we are full of literature this morning. Othello again?’
‘The Bible. My father was an archdeacon, remember, so you can hardly feel threatened by that.’
Daphne gave as good as she got, thought Ellie, which was one of the reasons she liked her.
She said, ‘Listen, can you stay for lunch? I’d really like to talk. Or we could go out and get a sandwich at the pub.’
‘Sorry, I’m on my way to the Mossy Bank Garden Centre, would you believe? It’s the other side of the bypass and as I was going to be so close, I couldn’t resist dropping in to see how you were. Patrick and I are lunching in their caff, God help us. He’s been advising them on roses and I think he feels the sight of his expensive wife will help prepare them for the sight of his expensive bill. I’d suggest you came but I think your Save the Peatbogs T-shirt might be counterproductive. I could manage a drink this evening though.’
‘Shit. I’ve got my Liberata group coming round.’
‘What’s that? Plastic kitchenware or one of those sexy undies groups?’
‘No, the Liberata Trust’s a human rights organization, sort of Amnesty with feminist attitude… oh, ha ha.’
She saw from her friend’s face that she was being sent up.
Daphne said, ‘Oh well, if you’d rather save the world than have a drink with your friend…’
‘Yeah, yeah. Truth is, the world’s had to look after itself over the past couple of months. I’ve been feeling guilty – yes, I know; there I go again – so when Feenie rang about the next meeting, I said why not have it round here?’
‘Feenie? You don’t mean Serafina Macallum, the mad bag lady?’
‘That’s right. Our founder, chair and driving force. How on earth do you know her?’
‘She sold us the bothy. Or at least her lawyer did. We never met her during the negotiations, but I’ve come close to being run down by her several times, both in that clapped-out Land Rover she drives, and on that ancient bike. You’d think she had something against me.’
Ellie concealed the thought that this was probably truer than Daphne guessed. She knew that what Feenie Macallum resented about the break up of her family estate wasn’t losing bits of property but the kind of people she had to lose them to.
Her own ignorance of the details of the Aldermanns’ purchase of a country cottage lay in her knee-jerk disapproval when Daphne had mentioned it a couple of years earlier.
‘Patrick loves to see the kids and their friends enjoying themselves but he does go white when he sees them turning the garden into a football pitch or a badminton court, so I said, Why don’t we buy a chunk of unspoilt countryside which they can then spoil to their hearts’ content,’ she’d said.
And Ellie hadn’t been able to bite back the caustic comment that helping put the price of rural housing out of the reach of other people’s children hardly seemed a proportionate solution to Patrick’s concern for his precious roses.
The cottage hadn’t been much mentioned between them thereafter, and when it was, Ellie hadn’t been able to decide if Daphne’s insistence on calling it the bothy was diplomatic understatement or provocative meiosis. Nor was she really sure whether her own attitude was pure social indignation or part dog-in-the-manger envy.
Now she wished she hadn’t been so quick to make it a no-go area, both conversationally and geographically, as her certainty that Feenie Macallum would have soaked the purchasers for as much as she could get, then put the money to some very good use, would have allowed her to have her cake and eat it.
‘Anyway,’ continued Daphne, ‘she doesn’t look as if she knows what day of the week it is. Ring her up, tell her she’s got it wrong.’
‘Feenie is as sharp as a butcher’s knife,’ retorted Ellie. ‘And there are others concerned and I’ve mucked them about once already. The meeting should have been yesterday, but when I thought I was going to be riding herd on the school outing, I had to ring round everybody and rearrange. Oh God. I forgot to remind Peter they were coming.’
‘Never mind,’ said Daphne. ‘What pleasanter surprise can there be for a hard-working bobby than to come home and find his house full of anarchist do-gooders? So let’s see if we can find a window in your crowded calendar. Lunch sometime later this week? Patrick’s going to some horticultural conference in Holland in the morning, Diana’s down at her cousin’s in Dorset and David’s at the bothy with some sixth-form chums. God, you are lucky to be in the State system. Costs you nothing and they spend most of their time at school, while we pay a fortune and ours are hardly ever there!’
Ellie smiled, but didn’t rise. A wise avenger picks her own payback time. Lunch at Rosemont, which invariably consisted of Marks and Sparks goodies tarted up to look home-made, should provide a good launch pad.
‘That sounds great,’ she said. ‘Any day but tomorrow. We’re going out to Enscombe. They’ve got some kind of menagerie at the Hall. Ed Wield, who lives in the village, was foolish enough to mention it to Rosie and she didn’t leave him alone till he promised to show her round.’
‘Wield? That’s the ugly sergeant, isn’t it? Didn’t you say he was a bit…?’
Daphne made a rocking gesture with her hand.
‘Gay?’ said Ellie. ‘That’s right. Except not a bit. All of him. And despite anything you learned at Sunday School, it doesn’t mean he lies in wait for small children.’
‘Never thought it did,’ said Daphne. ‘He struck me as a very nice man. And I recall Daddy saying that he preferred his curates gay, as it was easier to look after the choir when the curate was around than it was to look after the curate with the Mothers’ Union in full cry. Now I must whizz off and earn my keep. A garden centre caff! The mind boggles.’
‘Regards to Patrick,’ said Ellie. ‘And watch out for greenfly.’
She waved her friend goodbye, noting with self-mocking envy that since last they met she’d changed her car again for a sporty Audi, gave another wave to DC Dennis Seymour, and went back inside.
Mention of her Liberata meeting reminded her that she’d promised herself to do a bit of preparation. She’d completely neglected this and most other commitments during the past few weeks, but when Feenie Macallum asked questions, a wise acolyte had answers. She went back upstairs and switched on the laptop. There were no visible aftereffects of the coffee and she clicked on Liberata in her Documents and studied the names that came up. These were the women Feenie had allocated to her to be in correspondence with. Most were in prison. All were in trouble. Few were able to reply, so writing to them was often an act of faith. But as Feenie said, even if the letter is intercepted, it tells someone out there that we know these women exist and are victims, and that might make the difference between life and death.
She selected the first on her list, Bruna Cubillas, the first alphabetically but also the first in Ellie’s affections. There’d been replies from Bruna, enough for a real relationship to be established, and written with an intensity of feeling that took Ellie by surprise. She’d mentioned this to Feenie, who’d said, ‘If someone offers you a helping hand when you’re drowning, you grip tight.’
She began to write.
Dear Bruna,
How are you? I am sorry I have not written to you for so long but my life was turned upside down a little while ago.
She paused and tried to think how turned upside down could be rendered in Spanish. She usually made some attempt to translate the more idiomatic bits of her letters, though perhaps by now it wasn’t necessary. Bruna had said she was keen to build on her smattering of English, and asked for some books to help her. Ellie had sent off a boxful, ranging from The House at Pooh Corner to a complete Shakespeare, but what progress she might have made Ellie had no idea. A hasty postscript to Bruna’s last letter had offered a gracias for ‘the book’, meaning presumably the suspicious and repressive prison regime had allowed only one of her boxful through. That was, she worked it out, almost a year ago. Ellie had written several letters since, but her last had been several weeks before Rosie’s illness. She thought ruefully of how flimsy a thing her concern for this poor imprisoned and probably tortured woman thousands of miles away had proved in the presence of immediate and personal pain, but she couldn’t feel guilty. Once, perhaps, but not now. Am I growing more or less selfish?
She returned her attention to the letter.
How much of her recent trauma should she lay out here? Feenie’s words came back to her. ‘Tell them everything about yourself,’ she commanded. ‘However trite, however tragic. That way they’ll know you really care, you’re not just dishing up nourishing broth for the peasants. What you’re doing is letting them know there is a real world still going on beyond their prison walls, there are real people still living their lives beyond the blank faces of their guards and torturers.’
But when Ellie had asked for information about Bruna, Feenie had shaken her head.
‘Best you don’t know,’ she said. ‘These women live under regimes and in circumstances you can’t imagine. Sometimes they are totally innocent, but sometimes they may have done things which you in your ignorance could find hard to understand or justify. All you need to know is that they are suffering cruel and unnatural treatment. It is your task to give them hope. What they give you in return is up to them.’
Ellie began typing again.
My little girl Rosie was taken ill…
The phone rang.
Irritated, she went next door into the bedroom and picked up the receiver.
‘What?’ she bellowed.
‘Charming. I wish I hadn’t bothered.’
‘Daphne, is that you? What’s up? You forget something?’
‘Only how brusque you can be. Listen, I just thought I’d ring you to tell you you’re being watched.’
‘Yes, I know. Dennis Seymour. I thought you said he spoke to you…’
‘Don’t be so dim, Ellie. I don’t mean him. You know those plane trees on that little triangle of no-man’s-land at the corner of your road? Well, I noticed this fellow hanging about there when I drove past earlier. Only then, not knowing anything about yesterday’s punch-up at the Pascoe corral, I didn’t pay much heed. But when I passed the trees just now and saw he was still there, still looking towards your house, I thought, Hello-Hello-Hello, this looks like one for a citizen’s arrest.’
‘Daphne, don’t you dare! Don’t do anything. I’ll get the guy on watch to deal.’
‘So what are you going to do? Run out of the house and point this way? No, listen, untwist your knickers. Count up to a hundred. All I’m going to do is get out of the car and stroll back towards him and distract him with brilliant conversation. When you get to a hundred, then head out to your guardian angel and send him winging this way as quick as he likes. And if chummy here tries to do a runner, I’ll stick my leg out and send him sprawling, a tactic for which I was once renowned in Mid-Yorkshire girls’ hockey circles.’
‘No,’ insisted Ellie. ‘Do nothing. I’ll –’
‘Start counting. One, two, three…’
The phone went dead.
Ellie didn’t hesitate. She went sprinting down the stairs, out of the house, down the drive, waving and calling to the watching Seymour. He spotted her and started to get out of the car.
‘No!’ she screamed. ‘Stay there! Start up!’
He was, God be thanked, quick-witted enough to obey.
‘Turn, turn, turn! Go, go, go!’ commanded Ellie, scrambling into the passenger seat.
‘Where are we going?’ he asked calmly as he accelerated through a U-turn, getting the car up to sixty in about nine seconds.
‘We’re there!’ she yelled. ‘Stop. Oh, sweet Jesus.’
The car snaked to a halt alongside the plane trees.
A figure slumped against one of them, head thrown back to show a face which was a mask of blood.
‘Call an ambulance,’ cried Ellie, leaping from the car and rushing towards her friend. ‘Daphne, are you all right?’
The woman made a gasping noise which may or may not have been an answer, but at least her eyes were open and she was moving and breathing.
‘Why didn’t you wait?’ Ellie couldn’t stop herself from asking as she knelt to examine the damage. ‘Oh Jesus. What a mess. Is it just your face or are you hurt anywhere else?’
‘…aar…’ gasped Daphne.
‘What? Where?’
‘Car. Bastard took my car. Oh God. Look at the state of this blouse.’
vii
a pint of guinness
‘That’s two days in succession our street’s been full of police cars,’ said Ellie. ‘The neighbours are going to start complaining about you bringing your work home.’
‘They should think themselves lucky I’m not a rock star,’ said Pascoe.
‘We should all think ourselves lucky for that,’ said Ellie.
They were at the hospital, to which Ellie had accompanied Daphne in the ambulance. Pascoe had arrived almost simultaneously. He could see she was seriously stressed, but coping by dint of having someone else to look after. Activity had always been her way of dealing with life’s ambushes.
She’d told him what little she knew. Daphne had gasped out her car number and the policeman on watch had put out an alert. Apart from that, she had on Ellie’s insistence concentrated on using her mouth for breathing.
‘Peter, how’re you doing? You here for Mrs Aldermann?’
Dr John Sowden was an old acquaintance, almost an old friend, of Pascoe’s. They had first met at the intersection of a police and medical case and perhaps because that had marked out so clearly the parameters of their areas of common ground, their friendship had somehow only flourished in miniature, like a bonsai tree.
‘That’s right. How is she?’
‘Fine, considering someone’s given her a fair bang on the nose. Broken but I think we’ll get away without surgery.’
‘Any other injuries?’
‘No. Some shock from the assault and the loss of blood, but nothing that a good night’s rest won’t put right. I’ve got a nurse cleaning her up now, then she’ll be ready to go home. What is it? Your friendly neighbourhood mugging? Were you with her when it happened, Ellie? Can check you out as well, if you like.’
He was looking at the blood on her T-shirt.
‘No, thanks,’ said Ellie. ‘This is Daphne’s. I got there later. I’m fine.’
It wasn’t a complete lie. She consulted her body and mind and found that she felt a lot better than she thought she ought to. Perhaps like a vampire I need blood to feed on, she thought, watching as Pascoe, with an apologetic smile in her direction, drew Sowden a little way along the corridor and spoke to him in a low voice.
When he rejoined her she said, ‘So?’
‘So you heard it all. He wasn’t keeping anything back for my ears only.’
‘Well, I’m pleased about that, else this new, violent doppelgänger of mine might have been tempted to break his nose too.’
But she smiled as she said it. She liked John Sowden. He was pretty sound on issues like abortion and euthanasia and he had a mouth to die for.
A few moments later they were allowed into the treatment room where they found Daphne sitting on the edge of a bed, drinking tea.
She said, ‘Ellie, have you seen the state of me? I shall have to go into purdah for a month at least.’
‘No, you look fine, honestly. You’ll have those English-rose looks back in no time.’
‘An English rose I don’t mind but not when I’m wearing it bang in the middle of my face. Oh God, has anyone been in touch with Patrick? No way I can go to the garden centre like this. They’d probably spray me with an anti-black-spot mixture.’
‘I tried your home number on my mobile,’ said Pascoe. ‘No reply. Give us the name of this garden centre and I’ll make sure he gets a message to come here and collect you.’
‘No, please. Just say I can’t make it to lunch, I’ll see him at home later,’ said Daphne firmly. ‘It’s called Mossy Bank. Thank you, Peter, you’re a darling.’
Pascoe stepped aside to make the call and Ellie sat on the bed next to her friend and put her arm around her.
‘Watch out for blood,’ said Daphne. ‘This blouse is ruined.’
‘It’ll come out,’ said Ellie. ‘And I’m well spattered already.’
‘Are you? Let me see. Oh, I’m sorry. I hope it’s not one of your best.’
Ellie, knowing well Daphne’s view that baggy T-shirts, especially those printed with subversive messages, were the nadir of style and taste, laughed out loud and said, ‘I’ll insist that you personally buy me an exact replacement in the market. So, my girl, what the hell did you think you were playing at, provoking this hoodlum? He might have had a knife or a gun or anything.’
‘Didn’t see why you should have all the fun. But why is it when a snotty-nosed Trot like you mixes with the lowlife, you get to kick them in the balls, while a respectable Tory lady like me ends up in hospital?’
Before Ellie could answer, Pascoe rejoined them, saying, ‘That’s done. Daphne, I hope you haven’t been telling Ellie your tale because you’re just going to have to tell it to me again.’
‘She was just going to start,’ said Ellie.
‘I was just going to tell you it was all your fault, actually,’ said Daphne. ‘I had it all sorted. I was going to stroll up to this fellow and distract his attention. Then while he had his back turned on your house (after the count of one hundred, remember?), you were going to get your guardian angel to come scooting along to make an arrest. Except that just as I got to him, you came belting out of your driveway, waving your arms and screaming at that poor policeman in the car. Naturally my man realized something was up and turned to make his getaway. Equally naturally, I attempted to grapple with him and keep him there. Upon which he nutted me, I think is the phrase. It’s something I’ve often seen on the telly and I’ve always assumed its effect was a touch exaggerated, like people in Westerns being hurled backwards when someone shoots them. Now I know better. It’s a funny thing how much closer I’ve got to the realities of lowlife since I met you, Ellie.’
‘It’s another funny thing,’ said Ellie, ‘that now you can’t talk down your nose, you sound almost normal.’
‘Daphne,’ said Pascoe quickly. ‘This man, can you describe him?’
‘Well, he was furtive, you know. Perhaps not so much furtive as simply loitering. That’s what made me notice him, though, as I told Ellie. I wouldn’t really have paid any attention if she hadn’t told me about her dreadful experience of yesterday…’
As Daphne Aldermann got older, she sounded more and more like an archdeacon’s daughter, thought Pascoe. Or rather the way you expected an archdeacon’s daughter to sound in an old black and white play, circumlocutory and slightly prissy, with audible inverted commas appearing round any modernism. She should have been a judge. Or at least a magistrate. Yes, she was precisely the type of woman who, despite valiant efforts to broaden the selectorate, still dominated on the magisterial bench. Not that she’d ever shown the slightest ambition in the direction so far as he knew. And while she might make bath sound like an American novelist, she could pronounce the shibboleth which got you admitted to Ellie’s friendship so there had to be more to her than met the eye. Which was probably true of her husband also. A quiet, charming man who lived for roses, he had been in the frame for not one but several apparently accidental deaths. Nothing was ever proved, and in his company Pascoe blushed to recall his suspicions. And yet… and yet…
‘Could you describe him, please, Daphne?’ he said.
‘Yes, of course. Sorry, I’m jabbering a bit, aren’t I? First time I’ve been assaulted, you see. Comes as a shock, especially when the motive isn’t sexual. No, that’s a stupid thing to say, it would obviously have been a much greater shock if he’d then gone on to rape me. What I mean is, he just nutted me as if… well, as if I were a man.’
‘Not an English gentleman then?’ murmured Pascoe, winning a Medusa glare from Ellie. ‘Sorry.’
‘No. You’re right. I mean, I’m not saying he wasn’t English, or British anyway. As Ellie keeps on telling me, we’re a rainbow society now. But he certainly wasn’t Anglo-Saxon. He was dark, not negroid, just well-grilled, like Ellie. I wish I tanned like that but with my colouring all you get’s a splotchy pink. Still, they say nowadays it’s bad for you, too much sun, gives you skin cancer… not that I’m suggesting for one moment, dear, that you’re in danger of that. No, I’m sure in your case it’s all down to natural pigmentation…’
‘Putting aside the interesting question of Ellie’s ethnic origins,’ said Pascoe, ‘you’re saying this fellow was well-tanned? Hair?’
‘Yes, of course. Sorry, I mean it was black, cut short, I don’t mean shaven, not like those – do they still call them bovver boys?’
‘The term is, I believe, a trifle passé,’ said Pascoe. ‘So, short hair. Moustache? Beard?’
‘Yes, now I come to think of it, he did have a moustache,’ said Daphne. ‘Not a big one. Short too. Like his hair. In fact, he was very neat generally, almost dapper. He would have made a very good head waiter at a decent restaurant.’
Was she taking the piss? He glanced at Ellie, who gave him her sardonic smile. She had once advised him, not much point in mocking Daphne when she’s so much better at it herself. But it was hard to resist the temptation. And she seemed to enjoy it in a harmlessly flirty kind of way. Harmless because there wasn’t the slightest sign he turned her on, and he himself had never gone overboard on English roses, who, in a metamorphosis which might have been of interest to Ovid, often seemed to age into English horses.
Whatever, the technique finally got him a pretty good description. Not very big, five-six, five-seven maybe, slim build, thin face, sharp-nosed, wearing a dark-blue lightweight jacket of good cut (Daphne had an eye for clothes), well-pressed light-grey slacks without turn-ups, wine-coloured loafers (this with a moue of distaste), an open-necked powder-blue shirt, and a gold chain with some sort of medallion round his neck.
‘Excellent,’ said Pascoe. ‘Hang on.’
He raised Control on his mobile and passed on the description. In return he was told that the Audi had been found.
‘That’s quick,’ said Pascoe.
‘Didn’t get far. Leyburn Road. A shopping parade. You know it, sir?’
‘Know it? I owe money there.’
It was five minutes’ drive from his house, ten minutes’ walk via the recreation ground.
‘Who’s there?’ he asked.
‘Sergeant Wield.’
That was good. Everything would be in smooth running order.
‘Pass him the description,’ said Pascoe, unnecessarily, he was sure, but he said it anyway. Ellie, who’d picked up the gist, was hissing something at him.
‘What?’
‘The car, is it OK?’
For a second the words who the hell cares about the sodding car? formed in his mind. But the answer was too obvious for them to get near his lips. Ellie cared. Not about the car, but about the fact that her friend had been hurt acting, albeit unasked, on her behalf. Her concern about the car was, literally, a damage-limitation exercise.
‘Is the Audi OK?’ he asked.
‘Far as we know, no problem. Just neatly parked.’
‘Thanks.’ He switched off and said, ‘The Audi’s parked in Leyburn Road. It looks fine.’
‘That’s something, isn’t it, Daph?’
Daphne managed a smile at her friend and said, ‘Yes, that’s something.’
She doesn’t give a damn either, thought Pascoe. But she understands what Ellie’s on about.
He said, ‘OK if we move on? This guy, did he speak at all?’
‘Not a word. What in the circumstances do you think he might have found to say?’
‘Well, something like, Take that, you bitch, when he hit you.’
‘Take that, you bitch? Really, Peter, you’re so old-fashioned sometimes. No, he said nothing, or nothing I heard. What I did hear was my Audi revving up and I thought, the bastard’s stealing my car.’
‘You’d left the key in the ignition?’
‘Yes, and my mobile phone on the dash. Is that still there, by the way? No, of course you won’t know. Stupid of me, now I come to think of it. If I’d got chummy to the car, he’d have been dead suspicious soon as he realized I could have rung for help, wouldn’t he?’
‘Not as suspicious as he’d have been when he turned the key and the engine started first time,’ smiled Pascoe. ‘I’ll check out the phone. There’ll be a car waiting to take you home soon as you’re ready.’
He left Daphne in Ellie’s care and went out. Dennis Seymour was waiting for him in the corridor, looking anxious. Reason told him his watching brief hadn’t extended to covering all Mrs Pascoe’s friends and acquaintance, but he knew from personal experience that in the matter of a man’s family, reason did not always apply. But Pascoe was not in the accusing mood.
He said, ‘So, Dennis. You been racking your brains for me?’
‘Yes, sir. Sorry. Nothing more than what I told you. Like I said, I took a note of every vehicle that went along the street while I was on watch. Nothing acting suspiciously. Control’s checked the numbers. Nothing dodgy. All good citizens, nothing known.’
‘OK. Try this for size.’
Pascoe repeated Daphne’s description of her assailant.
Seymour said, ‘No. Didn’t see anyone like that in any of the cars. As for on foot, I saw nobody except the postman. I’m really sorry.’
‘Don’t be. It takes up space in your mind and I want every iota of your attention focused on Mrs Pascoe. In your sights at all times, OK?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Right. I’m on my way to Leyburn Road.’
Seymour watched Pascoe go with relief. No bollocking, no attempt to suggest he was at fault. But sometimes Pascoe being quiet and reasonable could be as intimidating as Fat Andy Dalziel on the rampage.
In Leyburn Road he found Wield watching the Audi getting a preliminary going-over by a white-overalled technician. There was a mobile phone on the dash.
‘How’s Mrs Aldermann?’ asked the sergeant.
‘Stiff upper lip, literally,’ said Pascoe. ‘Nose broken, some shock, but still talking. And making sense. What’s happening here?’
‘I’ve got a couple of lads checking the shops to see if anyone noticed the car arriving or anyone fitting your description. Also, they’re asking if the shopkeepers can remember any of their customers in the last hour in case they can come up with something.’
That was good thinking, but Pascoe didn’t say so. Wield would merely be puzzled at being complimented on doing the basics of his job.
Pascoe looked around. The car was parked by the roadside in front of the little shopping complex – grocer, greengrocer, butcher, baker, newsagent, hardware store – which people in the area used conscientiously, aware that letting themselves be lured by the cheaper prices of the superstore only ten minutes’ drive away would soon unleash a drowning shower of rain on the Leyburn Road parade. But the shops were rarely so busy that the assistants wouldn’t have time to glance outside occasionally.
The technician backed carefully out of the Audi and straightened up with a groan of relief.
Pascoe said, ‘Anything?’
The man shook his head and said, ‘Sorry. Looks like he was careful. Everything wiped clean.’
‘Thanks, anyway,’ said Wield. ‘What now, Pete? I’m out of ideas.’
Pascoe smiled as if at an absurdity and said, ‘OK, let’s suppose this guy left his own car here and walked round to watch my house because he felt he’d draw less attention on foot. He steals Daphne’s car because he needs to get back here quick, but he isn’t panicking. He still takes time to wipe his prints. If he’s as cool as that, he wouldn’t park next to his own car because that’s the kind of thing that draws attention, a man jumping out of one car and getting straight into another. So he parks, gets out, and walks.’
As if doing a reconstruction, Pascoe set off at a brisk pace with Wield in close pursuit.
‘Doesn’t help us unless we get a witness saw him walking,’ panted the sergeant.
‘I know. But listen, parking’s bad around here. Not a lot of room.’
Wield could see he was right, but not what he was getting at. In front of the shops there was kerbside parking space for only half a dozen cars. In one direction Leyburn Road curved into a double-yellow-line bend and in the other it ran into the busy ring road via a roundabout, beside which stood a pseudo-Victorian shiny-tiles-and-leaded-lights pub, the Gateway.
It was the pub Pascoe was heading for.
As he walked he explained, ‘When it’s busy here, shoppers often use the pub car park. Billy Soames, the landlord, wants to avoid getting into dispute with the shopkeepers, so he’s put up a sign at the entrance: No charge to shoppers, but it helps if you at least buy a packet of crisps in the bar! Could be that’s where chummy parked his own car. Let’s ask Billy if he noticed a small suntanned man with a moustache using his facilities this morning.’
‘Why not?’ said Wield.
His mobile rang. He put it to his ear and listened. When he switched off, Pascoe, who, like an astronomer after a lifetime’s study of the pocked and pitted surface of the moon, had learned to interpret a few of the sergeant’s expressions, said, ‘You look pleased.’
‘Something I recalled from house-to-house yesterday. One of your neighbours, Mrs Cavendish, noticed a car stopping at the end of the street then turning back when all the troops had turned up. Didn’t seem important then. But it popped into my mind just now when we got Mrs Aldermann’s description of the man who attacked her, so I checked it out.’
‘And?’
‘Her words were, the man was swarthy, moustachioed and sinister.’
‘That sounds like old Mrs C.,’ said Pascoe. ‘And the car?’
‘Metallic-blue. Sounds like a Golf. Could be owt or nowt but the description fits, sort of. She half remembered a bit of the number too, so if it turns out there was a blue Golf in the pub car park…’
‘Anyone ever tell you you’re a treasure?’ said Pascoe.
‘Not since breakfast. By the by, that guy we talked about this morning, the student, Franny Roote. I never saw him. This sound anything like?’
‘Not like the way he was back then. Size might fit, but he was blond.’
‘Perhaps prison’s turned him black.’
‘Perhaps. I’ll find out tomorrow. Somehow I doubt he’s got anything to do with this, but if he has, could be the sight of me will make a good gloat irresistible.’
‘You still fancy Cornelius, do you?’
‘Don’t know. Maybe. There’s something odd going on there. You know that they found this message on her computer at the bank? It just said, TIME TO GO. And there was another on her e-mail at her apartment. STILL HERE? OH DEAR. Unsourced, but dated the day she took off. So there’s someone in the background.’
‘Ollershaw, you think? Trying to scare her into making a run for it? But he didn’t want her caught and talking, so now he wants to pressure you to get her out?’
Wield’s tone was dubious.
‘Doesn’t sound likely, does it?’ said Pascoe. ‘And I tend to agree with Andy about Ollershaw. Slippery but not physical. Anyway, I’m back in court with her tomorrow, so if someone really is trying to twist my arm to go easy opposing the bail application, then they’ll need to get in touch soon.’
They had reached the pub.
The landlord greeted them with the wariness all landlords exhibit on spotting the fuzz on the premises, but soon relaxed when he understood the nature of their enquiries. Inured by long experience to disappointment or at best ambiguity, Pascoe was almost taken aback when Billy Soames said instantly, ‘Yeah. Sure. I remember them.’
‘Them?’
‘That’s right. I saw them arrive, two of them got out of the car, the little dark one set off down the road and the other one came in and ordered a pint of Guinness and a bag of crisps. First customer of the day. He sat there reading his paper for maybe three-quarters of an hour, then his mate looked through the door and sort of beckoned like he was in a hurry. And the pop-eyed one got up straightaway and went out.’
‘Pop-eyed? What do you mean?’
‘He had these sort of bulging eyes. Light-coloured hair going a bit thin. About forty. Big scar, newish-looking, along the left side of his head. Pasty complexion, didn’t look like he spent much time in the sun.’
‘And the car? Did you spot the make, Billy?’
‘Merc sports. White.’
‘Oh. Not a blue Golf,’ said Pascoe stupidly.
The landlord gave Pascoe a long-suffering look and said judiciously, ‘Well, it wasn’t blue, it was white, and it wasn’t a Golf, it was a Merc, so I’d have to say no, Peter, unless I’m deceived, it wasn’t a blue Golf. Sorry to be such a disappointment.’
‘You’ve done great,’ Pascoe assured him.
Wield said, ‘Where was he sitting?’
‘Over there. By the window.’
Wield wandered across and picked up a newspaper from the windowsill.
‘Was this the paper he was reading?’
‘Probably.’
Carefully Wield fitted the paper into an evidence bag.
‘Which way did the car go?’ asked Pascoe.
‘Out onto the bypass,’ said the landlord. ‘All this any help to you?’
‘Oh yes,’ said Pascoe, knowing the value of friendly eyes and ears in public houses. ‘Tremendous. Billy, you are a prince among publicans.’
‘I’ll remember that next time I’m being hassled about after-hours drinking.’
‘Anything else you can tell us about the man you served?’
‘Popeye? Not really. Didn’t have much of a crack, got a delivery just after I served him. Except the way he spoke, that is.’
‘And how was that?’
‘Well, drinking the Guinness it didn’t surprise me. He was Irish.’
viii
spelt from Sibyl’s leaves
I’m Popeye the pop-up man…
So called because he’s harder to keep down than Bounce-back Bill Clinton.
Started way back on Bloody Sunday when eleven-year-old schoolboy Patrick Ducannon, uninvolved son of uninvolved parents got shot by the paras.
Registered d.o.a. at Belfast Infirmary, but sat up and asked for his mammy when the priest dropped some hot candle wax on him. (Well, that’s the crack, and why not? No reason the devil and Gaw Sempernel should have all the good stories.)
After that, of course he was involved.
And very unlucky or very lucky depending on how close to him you were standing.
Age twenty: dragged out of an exploded bomb factory in Derry covered with burnt flesh and bleeding offal, most of which turned out to belong to his two fellow ham-fisted bombardiers who in death proved so inseparable they had to be buried in the same grave.
Age twenty-four: shot as he drove a stolen car through a checkpoint. Car crashed through a wall and rolled down a railway embankment. Three passengers killed instantaneously. Popeye crawled out of the wreckage and ran down a tunnel from which he emerged a few moments later pursued by a train. Three days in hospital, three years in jail.
Age twenty-nine: shot, stabbed and beaten by a unit of the UVF as he lay in his bed with his girlfriend. She died four days later. He went to her funeral.
Age thirty-three: retired from active service with the IRA, perhaps because of his reputation for out-living everyone he worked closely with. Became a quartermaster, specializing in the acquisition of cutting-edge weaponry which was put in deep storage against the long promised day of total insurrection.
Kept out of trouble for a while till one winter’s night in Liverpool docks he turned up in the cab of a truck carrying a consignment of arms which we knew had been landed somewhere on the east coast during the previous forty-eight hours.
Straightforward search-and-detain operation went haywire when one of the Provos suddenly reached into his jacket pocket. By the time it was established he was suffering an anxiety asthma attack and was pulling out his inhaler, he was dead, as were two of his companions and even Popeye, naturally the sole survivor, was seriously injured. Worse still (in the Great Gaw’s eyes at least, for he was in charge of the operation), the truck turned out to be carrying only a small part-load of ammo and a few rifles, not the large consignment of state-of-the-art weaponry Gaw had expected.
It must have been cached en route and there was only you left, Pop-up Popeye, who had any idea where.
That got you off the NHS waiting list and into Gaw’s own favourite hospital where you got better care than a royal who was a fully paid up member of BUPA. But it was still a close-run thing. Intensive care for two months, convalescent for another six, offered a deal which you refused so reluctantly that it was hard not to believe your medically supported claim that your injuries had left you seriously amnesiac.
The court, however, was unimpressed by this as a defence against the long list of charges prepared against you.
Sentenced to twelve years.
So Popeye the pop-up man, it looked like the system had done what its trained shooters couldn’t and buried you.
But…
I’m Popeye the pop-up man
Let them hit me as hard as they can
I’ll be here at the finish…
Came the peace process.
Age thirty-seven: released from jail after serving less than two years.
Maybe it was enough.
You and I have a lot in common, Popeye. Members of ruthless and dangerous organizations, we have both had to learn to survive any which way we could.
And we both have unfinished business with Gawain Sempernel. Or rather, I have unfinished business with him while he has unfinished business with you.
He’s going soon. He thinks no one beneath him knows it but you cannot keep a Sibyl and a secret at the same time.
And you, Popeye, are his farewell finger to the envious gods who he believes cannot bear such rival effulgence near their throne. Six months from now he hopes to be clasped to the bosom of our common alma mater, in the holy shrine of a Master’s Lodge, where he will sit with one buttock firmly on the faces of those poor dons whose careers are in his gift, and the other discreetly offered for former colleagues to kiss when they beat a path to his door in search of that advice and expertise only his lost omniscience can offer.
The poor sod has overdosed on Deighton and Le Carré!
So there you are, Popeye. We have both been screwed by Gaw Sempernel.
In fact, you could say that, thanks to him, in our different ways we both know what it is to exist locked up in a cell.
And now, though I am officially the turnkey, we find ourselves cheek by jowl in this cell within a cell that the great comedian Gaw calls Sibyl’s Leaves.
Imprisonment changes people. It gives them time to think.
I think a lot.
Popeye too. What he thought was probably something like – it’s coming to an end. Maybe I can finally get a life which doesn’t involve my old body being full of bullets and surrounded by corpses. I’ve survived the war, surely it can’t be all that hard to survive the peace?
It was going to be harder than you could have dreamt, Popeye.
You found a movement split and splintering under pressure of internal debate as to how to proceed in face of the new situation.
Worse, despite your continuing claims of amnesia, you found yourself courted by the most extreme groups for your knowledge of where the arms were hidden.
There must have been lots of heated debate.
There were certainly hairy moments when you were threatened with having the information tortured out of you by men who thought that Amnesia was a popular Far Eastern sexual tourism centre.
Still, a man who has survived being interrogated by Gaw Sempernel can survive anything.
But something had to give.
Finally, confused as to whether you were victor or victim, unable to understand whether you’d got what you’d been fighting for or not, you decided like many a thwarted philosopher before you that it was time to cultivate your own garden.
Maybe it was now your memory came back. Maybe it had never gone.
And if it brought you peril, it might as well bring you profit too.
Uniting for safety with a small group of fellow disenchanted releasees who thought that being applauded onto the platform at a Republican meeting was little enough reward for what they’d been through, you advertised for customers. And when you found your former colleagues less than keen to pay for what they regarded as already their own, you looked further afield.
A couple of minor but lucrative European and near-East deals followed. But your ace-in-the hole, the ‘biggie’ which was going to make your retirement fortune was the cache of state-of-the-art guns and missiles you’d left buried somewhere deep in enemy country during that cross country trip which ended in the Liverpool fiasco.
We know now (and as usual with Popeye, we’ve got the bodies to prove it) that the chosen site was a remote and inaccessible spur of Kielder Forest on the English/Scottish border.
For this cache you wanted a customer with serious money.
What you found was PAL, the smallest but most extreme of the Colombian guerilla groups, fallen on hard times not so much because of the activities of the official counter-insurgency forces, but because its immodestly, though not altogether inaccurately, self-styled ‘legendary’ leader, Fidel Chiquillo, had managed to get up the noses of high command in both Farc and ELN, the two most powerful rebel organizations.
They set about squeezing PAL out of existence by drying up its source of arms in the Americas. Word was spread; you sell to PAL, you don’t sell to us.
So here we have Chiquillo, desperate to re-establish himself on the Colombian scene, ready to go anywhere to do a deal. He has a contact in Europe, his negotiator, who sniffs out the deal with Popeye.
But even so far afield, deals are not easy for Chiquillo to make.
To get himself safe to the UK, to do the deal securely, then to get the shipment intact to South America, he needs allies powerful enough to ignore Farc, ELN, the drug barons and even the elected government itself.
So he turns to the los Cojos, that is el Consejo Juridico, the national security group whose operations are so clandestine they make the official secret police look like Dixon of Dock Green. Their jefe supremo, Colonel Gonzalo Solis (who lost a foot in a bomb attack in 1981, hence the nickname cojo, the lame one), knows where all the bodies are buried, which is not surprising as he has buried so many of them himself. Colombian politicians need to be nimble-footed indeed to satisfy the conflicting demands of such rapidly changing partners as the guerilla groups, the drug lords, the United Nations and their own electorate, and over many years, El Cojo has come to call the steps. He is the only man powerful enough to guarantee the deal, but even he hesitates before going up against the loose anti-PAL alliance which applies in the Americas.
But in the end the offer of a commission to be paid in Colombia’s favourite currency, pure cocaine, equal to the amount required by Popeye for his weapons proves impossible to resist.
The PAL embargo back home, he decrees, does not apply to deals done in Europe.
And to those in both high and low places who are ready to protest against his decision, he offers a private reassurance that there is no risk of a PAL resurgence. Indeed, quite the contrary. Chiquillo must come personally to close the deal as El Cojo’s guarantee of safe conduct applies only to the guerilla leader himself, not his negotiator. And once the deal is done, the Cojos’ European chief, Jorge Casaravilla, a man so ruthlessly violent that the colonel likes to keep him several thousand miles of blue water away, has instructions to scoop up everything and everyone with extreme prejudice.
Chiquillo agrees to the terms and makes his payment to El Cojo. His negotiator makes the final arrangements, and at last, by ways and means undetectable even by the eagle eye of soaring Gaw and the strange magic of his Sibyl, Chiquillo arrives in the UK and goes with his two Cojos escorts to the rendezvous in Kielder.
Anyone familiar with Popeye Ducannon’s track record might have forecast what happened next.
As always, chaos, catastrophe, corpses, and blood on the forest floor.
And, equally as always, when the gunsmoke settles, Popeye pops up out of the forest with nothing worse than a couple of flesh wounds, a crease along the side of his skull, and a bad headache.
All this and more he tells his one surviving colleague, Jimmy Amis, known as Amity James because of the friendly way he has with him when blowing off your kneecaps.
And all this and more Amity tells us when we pick him up and shake several credit cards under several names out of his pockets and point out that having qualified for early release under the Good Friday Agreement does not disqualify him from early return under the common law.
The more he tells us is that Popeye heard Chiquillo, the other survivor, telling someone on his mobile that he’d be with them at somewhere called the CP in two to three hours.
If he made it, that was. For according to Popeye, Chiquillo had taken a hit.
More importantly to Popeye, he’d taken both the weaponry and the bagful of coke which was payment for it.
Having worked all his life in a twilight world of deceit and betrayal, Popeye isn’t much bothered by the whys and wherefores. All he wants is what he regards as his pension fund back. The only clue he has is what he knows about Chiquillo’s negotiator. This, together with what the Cojos know about Chiquillo himself, might well lead them to both the man and the arms.
Alliances with Jorge Casaravilla are notoriously dangerous.
But so are alliances with Popeye Ducannon!
The last thing he said to Amity James was, ‘I’m just off to see a man about a dog. Or maybe it’s a dog about a man. Mind the shop while I’m gone, will you?’
Since then, absolute silence.
Except in our work as in nature there is no such thing.
Have you heard that silence where the birds are dead, yet something pipeth like a bird?
There’s always something piping.
And here I sit, Sibyl in her lonely cave, recording and replaying till finally I recognize the tune.
Piper, pipe that song again!
They’re still here, that’s what my sensors tell me and that’s what Gaw wants to hear, those arms and the man who stole them, and the drug fortune he didn’t pay for them, all still here hidden away somewhere connected with something contracted to CP. What does my Word Search give me?
Canadian Pacific? It’s a long way round to Colombia!
Cape Province? As above only more so.
Central Park? Worth checking which northern cities have a Central Park.
C.P. Snow? Does anyone still read him, I wonder.
Chelsea pensioner? At least it’s vaguely military.
Command post? So’s this. Right place for arms, I suppose.
Common prostitute? Hardly.
Communist Party? An office? Do they still have offices since glasnost?
Perhaps it was sea followed by something beginning with P?
Or maybe it was Spanish. Si pez? Yes fish. Si pie? Yes foot.
You’re getting silly, girl.
Face it, you’re not expected to work things out, just sit here and feed things in.
While the great giant Gaw is striding around out there, making sure he doesn’t tell anyone, including me, more than they need to know.
Oh, there are things you need to know, Gaw, and one day soon I look forward to telling you them. Then perhaps you’ll realize that walking over people is not a vocation for a true man, or even a grotesque imitation of one.
I’m Popeye the pop-up man
Let them hit me as hard as they can
I’ll be here at the finish
’Cos I eat up my spinach
I’m Popeye, the pop-up man!
ix
bag lady on a bike
Shirley Novello lay back in the front seat of her Fiat Uno.
Well, maybe lay back was stretching it a bit, which was more than even a medium-sized woman like herself could comfortably manage in such a small car. At least she could drive it comfortably, which longer legs would have made difficult. Mind you, a bit of discomfort would have been a cheap price to pay for longer legs. She looked down at hers with a critical eye. Even with ninety-five per cent of them visible as they emerged from a leather skirt hardly broader than a lumberjack’s belt, they couldn’t be termed long. What they could be termed was muscular. And what the hell was wrong with muscular? Muscularity was a quality she greatly admired in men. She found it a turn-on, and saw no reason to bother with people who didn’t return the compliment. Anyway, above the waist she could compete with anyone, she thought complacently, raising her eyes to the straining buttons of her sun top. Not many of those in a kilo ho ho, as the wet wankers in the canteen would say if they ever got wind of the battened-down bounty lurking beneath the sack-like muddy-brown T-shirts she favoured at work. These, plus a matching selection of baggy trousers, had dampened down awareness of her as a woman to the point where the sexist cracks were conventional rather than focused. A cop-out? Not really. A cop-in, more like it; meaning you sussed out the best way to permit yourself to function most efficiently as a cop. Like Sergeant Wield. There were still plenty of mutt-headed myopes around the station who didn’t realize he was gay, and were ready to give you an argument about it. How could anyone who looked like him and talked like him and put the fear of God into you like him be gay? Stands to reason. Wankers!
It was because of Wield that she was here on duty now, dressed in play gear rather than her workaday drabs. She’d been clocking off at four when he’d grabbed her.
‘Shirley, I need a body to spell Seymour watching Mrs Pascoe. Any chance?’
At least he framed it as a question.
She said, ‘Sarge, I’ve got plans for tonight that it’ll cost hearts to break. I can give you till eight if that’s any good.’
‘That’ll do fine. Thanks,’ he’d said.
So he was grateful which was nice. But was he trustworthy? She was due to meet a new boyfriend at a new club, both of which she had high hopes of, at eight thirty. Thirty minutes wasn’t much to get home and changed in even if her relief turned up on time. So, working on the principle that she wasn’t going to be under the gaze of the station neanderthals, she’d come on duty dressed for partying.
Privately she thought this watch on the Pascoe house was overkill. Chummy, who was probably this lad Roote, wasn’t likely to come back for a third go. She’d dug up the case file and he sounded a real nut. It had been back when Pascoe was still an unmarried sergeant and La Pascoe was teaching at a college where the Principal had been topped. Roote had evidently assaulted both Pascoe and the Fat Man, breaking a bottle of Scotch over the latter’s head. Just went to show there was good even in the worst of us! So, bang him up and fix for a patrol car to crawl past maison Pascoe every couple of hours!
Still, overtime was overtime. She turned on Radio One full blast and settled back to fantasize about the muscular young man who was her escort that night.
Then, just before seven, she saw the bag lady.
She was on a bicycle, but she was undoubtedly a bag lady. There were three plastic carriers dangling from the handlebars and another two either side of the saddle. The woman herself was something the far side of seventy, maybe the far side of eighty, with a round leathery face like an under-inflated football and wispy white hair escaping from beneath an unravelling straw hat whose brim looked like a horse had dined on it. Her ample body was draped in several layers of clothing that it would have taken an archaeologist to date. The bike itself was coeval with its rider, or perhaps a little older, its flaking khaki paint suggesting it might have seen service in the Great War.
Novello watched with mild amusement as this figure creaked towards her, then with heightened interest as the machine scraped to a halt, and finally with active alarm as the dismounted woman began to open the Pascoes’ gate.
It was hard to leave the car with dignity, but practise had enabled her to emerge from it with speed. The woman saw her coming and paused by the open gate. It occurred to Novello that if any, or all, of the carriers contained a deadly weapon, she was presenting a pretty unmissable target. A low ornamental wall to her right offered the only real cover and she flinched towards it as the old woman dipped her hand into one of the bags. But all she came out with was a large magnifying glass which she raised to her eyes, the better to study the approaching DC.
‘Excuse me, madam,’ said Novello, pulling out her ID. ‘Detective Constable Novello, Mid-Yorkshire CID. Do you mind telling me who you are and what you’re doing here?’
‘If you experience difficulty in answering these questions yourself, then perhaps you have strayed into the wrong employment, my girl,’ said the woman, in a voice rich with the kind of orotundity Novello only ever heard when she chanced on some ancient actress being interviewed on the telly.
She’ll probably turn out to be the DCI’s gran, she thought, but she persisted. ‘Please, madam. If you could just answer the question.’
‘Very well. I am Serafina Macallum, founder and life president of the Liberata Trust, and I am here to attend, nay, to chair, a meeting of our local group. For the record, and I assume we are being recorded though where the necessary apparatus might be concealed in such a deshabille as yours I cannot imagine, I would like to say that though long resigned to having my phone tapped and my mail interfered with, I had not thought that this so-called democracy of ours had degenerated to such open interference with the free movement of its citizens twice in the space of fifteen minutes.’
‘Twice?’ wondered Novello.
‘When I left my vehicle in the car park of the Gateway public house, I was accosted by a child in uniform under the pretext that he wished to know if I had been there earlier in the day.’
That figured. She’d heard that the landlord of the Gateway had spotted a white Mercedes parked there about midday with a driver fitting Daphne Aldermann’s description of the perp. Wield would have made sure someone went back there to check if any of this evening’s customers had been there at lunchtime and seen or heard anything.
‘And were you?’ asked Novello.
‘Certainly not. You think I do not have better things to do with my time than frequent public houses?’
‘But you’re parked there now,’ said Novello reasonably. ‘Incidentally, why didn’t you just keep on driving and park in the street here?’
‘I drive, reluctantly, on the main highways and some rural byways. But when I reach the environs of the town, I prefer the greater freedom of pedal power, and in addition I do not care to pollute other people’s living space.’
Stark staring, thought Novello. But that doesn’t stop her being the DCI’s gran. In fact, it might be a necessary qualification.
On the other hand, she didn’t have La Pascoe down as being religious which was all that Liberata suggested to her. Still, these days you never could tell.
‘This Liberata thing, that’s as in St Wilgefortis?’ she enquired.
The old woman looked at her sharply, then said, ‘It is good to see how thoroughly your masters brief you.’
‘Not masters. Mistresses. I went to a convent school. For a while anyway. The nuns were very keen to hammer home the important things like the lives of the saints. I’ve still got the broken knuckles to prove it.’
Why am I telling this old bat the story of my schooldays? she wondered. I’ll be telling her why I got thrown out next.
She said abruptly, ‘So Mrs Pascoe’s expecting you?’
‘Of course she is, though no doubt to maximize the harassment, you will wish to go through the motions of ascertaining that for yourself.’
She was right there, thought Novello, following the bicycle up the drive.
She rang the bell while Miss Macallum disengaged her bags from her bike. They were full of cardboard files, clipboards, sheets of newspaper, and other varieties of stationery. Novello noted with amusement that supermarket names printed on the bags had been scored over with a black marker pen.
Catching her gaze, Miss Macallum said, ‘I see no reason why the moguls of Mammon should make me the instrument of their aggrandizement.’
The door opened and Ellie Pascoe appeared.
Her expression gave Novello the information she required without need of question, and more besides.
Yes, Miss Macallum was telling the truth about the meeting, but Ellie Pascoe had forgotten all about it and found the prospect as appealing as a day-old hard-fried egg, an image which came to Novello’s mind as this was the only edible substance she’d found in her flat that morning when she started to prepare breakfast.
She risked a wry sympathetic smile and wished she hadn’t bothered. La P. gave her the cold cut, then her face blossomed into a welcoming smile as she said, ‘Feenie, good to see you. Come on in. Let me help you with your bags.’
Novello waited till the door was closing before saying, ‘Will there be many others, Mrs Pascoe?’
‘Three, maybe four. All women. And I’d prefer it if you didn’t march them all up to the door.’
‘I need to check them out,’ said Novello. ‘Maybe you could give a little signal before you let them in, just to confirm you know them?’
‘A signal?’ said Ellie, with an intonation normally reserved for A handbag? ‘What had you in mind?’
‘Nothing complicated. Just a little wave maybe.’
Ellie nodded and closed the door.
‘You do know how to wave, don’t you, Mrs Pascoe?’ said Novello to the woodwork.
Over the next ten minutes four more women arrived, all looking disappointingly normal after Feenie Macallum. The first three were admitted with a perfunctorily dismissive gesture of La P.’s hand. Only with the fourth was there a hesitation. Then the bag lady appeared behind La P. and spoke, the hand fluttered, the newcomer stepped inside and the door closed.
Novello settled down to pass the remainder of her stag with dreams of her stag to come, but about twenty minutes later she saw the DCI’s car turn into the drive. Pascoe got out and came back through the gateway towards her and she slid out of the Uno once more.
She saw him clocking her legs and the gear, but guessed he’d be too politically correct, or at least too polite, to comment.
‘Hi, Shirley,’ he said. ‘Anything happening?’
‘Yeah. Some kind of prayer meeting, I think.’
She told him about the Liberata Trust. He smiled as if she’d said something funny, but she also saw him repress the cold-fried-egg reaction. Not in front of the servants.
He said, ‘How long have you been here?’
‘Took over from Dennis at four.’
‘Good. I appreciate it.’
He gave her the Pascoe smile. Does he think we won’t be claiming the overtime? she wondered. But then he rubbed his hand across his face and suddenly looked very tired, very vulnerable, and Novello felt a pang of sympathy, but recalling his wife’s dusty response, she didn’t let it show.
‘Any development on the car spotted in the Gateway car park?’ she asked.
‘Not on the car, but one of the two men, the one in the pub, we got a print off his newspaper.’
‘That’s good. Known, sir?’
He hesitated. Wondering whether he wants to share this with underlings, thought Novello resentfully. But when he did reply, her resentment quickly faded.
‘Yes. Patrick Ducannon. He’s IRA, got a twelve-year stretch but out in two after the Good Friday Agreement. Word is he’s given up the cause. Certainly he’s blotted his copybook in Republican circles.’
‘Jesus,’ said Novello. ‘This is serious stuff. And the other guy…?’
‘Nothing. Doesn’t fit any known associate, at least not on our books.’
Meaning it might on somebody else’s? Like the security services whom all regular cops regarded as anal-retentive gits.
‘So this guy parks at the pub because he doesn’t want to be spotted sitting in his car, watching your house, and takes a stroll, thinking he’s safe, only Mrs Aldermann spots him…’
‘That’s how it looks,’ said Pascoe, suddenly impatient. ‘OK, Shirley, you can clock off now.’
‘Sir? I mean, I’m on till eight, then Seymour…’
‘I’ve cancelled Dennis already,’ said Pascoe firmly. ‘When I’m home, I’ll take care of things.’
Things being your wife and daughter, thought Novello. Then told herself, Stop that, Shirley! Why do you find it so hard to be nice to one of the few guys in the Force who’s gone out of his way to see you get an even break?
Answer: because anyone who has to think about treating you equally is treating you differently.
In other words, I’ll only accept help from people who don’t offer it. Which makes me nana of the month!
She said hesitantly, ‘Maybe I should check that out, sir.’
He said, ‘I don’t think so,’ very pleasantly, but with a finality that brooked no denial.
Please yourself, she thought, getting back into her car. Means I can get to the club all that earlier and stop anyone else trying to put a brand on my hunk of beef.
But best to play it safe, and as she drove away, she called Control and put it on record that she was abandoning her watch in response to a direct order from the DCI.
And finally, because she was a good cop as well as an ambitious one, she made a mental note to check out if possible what made the old bag lady so unsurprised to find herself, as she imagined, under surveillance. Probably a waste of time. What could someone as comically decrepit as Feenie Macallum have to do with the real world that a smart young cop lived in? But she’d noticed the DCI’s flicker of amusement when she’d talked about a prayer meeting, and certainly she couldn’t see religion playing a large part in La Pascoe’s profile.
Then she closed her mental notebook, hit the accelerator, and as the tiny engine shook and roared, she gave herself entirely to a matching anticipation of the delights which lay ahead.
x (#ulink_2f800bb6-0762-51a1-8af4-020d0532645e)
spelt from Sibyl’s leaves (#ulink_2f800bb6-0762-51a1-8af4-020d0532645e)
Feenie Macallum…
A blast from the past. Dear old Feenie, whose first entry was probably made with a quill pen on parchment. Box file, card index, microfiche, this Serafina has flown through the lot and here she is, wings neatly folded, sleeping in my casket waiting for the kiss of Sir Gawain to awaken her.
fighting the world with a protest that no one will heed…
except those in need…
What does Daddy think as he looks down upon, or perhaps up at, his beloved daughter? Mungo Macallum, whose Celtic beginnings not even my little electronic moles have been able to dig up. The working classes of the nineteenth century still offered that option which all classes of the twenty-first century would give their eye teeth for – impenetrable obscurity.
But there he was, an exile in Yorkshire at the turn of the century, already a man of brass, busy turning himself into a man of steel.
But not knives and forks and spoons for Mungo. Oh no. He didn’t let himself be dazzled by the bright dawn of this new Edwardian age, he looked beyond that last long garden party of privilege and class, he saw the approaching darkness and knew that this was to be the century of the gun.
Mungo Macallum, the armaments king.
There are some who say that you were the model for Undershaft in Major Barbara, Mungo. Great wealth from a morally dubious source, yet not without your own moral concerns. Poverty you saw as a cause of evil, not an effect. You paid, by the standards of the time, fair wages, and you underwrote the establishment of a savings bank to encourage providence among your workers, and a building society to give those who desired it the chance of buying their own homes.
And you led by example, showing the world how money wisely invested was the basis of prosperity.
In 1914 you were already rich. By 1918 you had wealth beyond computation.
In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
While westward eighty miles or so,
In England’s fields the profits grow.
And in a Yorkshire field, in that remote and peaceful wedge of coastal land called Axness, you found Granary House, a bat-infested, rat-infested ruin of a mansion looking out across the sea, far far away from the glow of the furnaces and the dust of the spoilheaps. Not that you were ever ashamed of the source of your wealth. And when you heard as you rebuilt and refurbished Granary House that your mocking friends were referring to it as Gunnery House, that’s what you officially renamed it.
Here at Gunnery you hoped to found a dynasty in a world which your own weaponry had made safe for your descendants. Lord Macallum of Axness. Oh, your title was all chosen, your coat of arms prepared. Cleverly you forbore to stoop for the windfalls the dying storm of war shook from the many branches of the new and Most Excellent Order of the British Empire. The golden fruit you wanted was not to be scabbed with war-profiteering sneers. Through the twenties you paved the way with charitable deeds. But you could not forbear to make assurance doubly sure by crossing the palms of those who claimed to be able to tell your noble future with gold and silver, and all your hopes died in the Honours for Sale scandal of 1933.
One plan had failed. Another looked like to fail. Three wives (by death, not divorce) had left you with a single child. But not the son you needed to lead off your dynasty.
Yet a man may do something, may do much, with a biddable daughter.
Alas, poor Mungo, what you had was not a biddable daughter.
What you had was Serafina, born as one war ended to come of age as another began.
Serafina, the passionate one.
And, for a while, Serafina, one of us.
For they were all ours for a while, those brave boys and girls who played their merry games in the enemy’s own yard. So many going, so few returning. But for that few, such a bright future, such a world of profit and delight lay ahead in those years after the shooting stopped and the real war, our kind of war, began.
But by that time you, Serafina, had been too long away, had caught a foreign infection, had gone native.
What you saw was not a world in the glorious turmoil of necessary recreation, with populations shifting, new battle lines being drawn up, new alliances formed, a glorious opportunity to play a part in the last and greatest crusade. No, what you saw was individuals suffering pain and deprivation and loss and injustice. Instead of population patterns, you saw refugees. Instead of demographic trends, you saw orphaned children. Instead of the forest, you saw the trees.
Oh, here it all is, Serafina, in your little casket. The charities, the agencies, the foundations, the movements, the causes, and hardly a one of them, to start with, whose strings were not being pulled by us. Or someone somewhere very like us.
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Reginald Hill
‘Luminously written, thrilling, unexpectedly erudite, and beautifully structured’ Geoffrey Wansell, Daily MailWhen Ellie Pascoe finds herself under threat, her husband DCI Peter Pascoe and Superintendent Andy Dalziel assume it’s because she’s married to a cop.While they hunt down the source of the danger, Ellie heads out of town in search of a haven… only to get tangled up in a conspiracy involving Irish arms, Colombian drugs and men who will stop at nothing to achieve their ends.Dalziel eventually concludes the security services are involved, but by then it is too late. Ellie’s on her own – and must dig deep down into her reserves to survive…
REGINALD HILL
ARMS AND THE WOMEN
A Dalziel and Pascoe novel
Copyright (#ulink_62262ab0-e763-558b-9777-3a07454d1c9e)
Harper An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2000
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
Copyright © Reginald Hill 2000
Extract from ‘Marina’ from the Collected Poems 1909–62 by T.S. Eliot (published by Faber and Faber Ltd) Reproduced by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd
Lines from ‘Girls’ by Stevie Smith from The Collected Poems of Stevie Smith (Penguin) © James McGibbon 1975
Extracts from The Englishman’s Flora by Geoffrey Grigson (Phoenix House 1987)
Extract from A Celtic Miscellany by Kenneth Hurlstone Jackson (Penguin 1971)
Reginald Hill asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication.
Source ISBN: 9780007313181
Ebook Edition © JULY 2015 ISBN: 9780007378548
Version: 2015-06-18
Dedication (#ulink_7abede52-2ed6-5caf-96b7-48c4ae4fa188)
This one’s for
those Six Proud Walkers
in whose company the sun always shines bright
Emmelien
Jane
Liz
Margaret
Mary
Teresa
who most Fridays of the year…on distant hills
Gliding apace, with shadows in their train,
Might, with small help from fancy, be transformed
Into fleet Oreads sporting visibly…
and, of course, laughing and talking and eating
almond slices,
with fondest greetings from
one of the trailing shadows!
Epigraph (#ulink_fd336c42-64a9-5288-bead-3e2922bc78d3)
What song the Syrens sang, or what name Achilles assumed when he hid himself among women, though puzzling Questions, are not beyond all conjecture.
SIR THOMAS BROWNE: Urn Burial
With my own eyes I’ve seen the Sibyl at Cumae hanging in a pot, and when the young lads asked her, what do you want for yourself, Sibyl? she replied, I want to die.
PETRONIUS: The Satyricon
Girls! although I am a woman
I always try to appear human
STEVIE SMITH: Girls!
Contents
Cover Page (#u2f6ceb49-4ff5-5067-87bc-fae8a36833db)
Title Page (#u31ed8494-9bfa-5d58-adc5-6b9d991ade21)
Copyright (#uc08b19f4-b35d-57e8-848b-c0d8ba163db4)
Dedication (#u597a5e52-8b21-5f31-9744-1169d41af957)
Epigraph (#ue6150805-54e2-562b-8669-7d8cdb38ce61)
PROLEGOMENA (#u29229597-eaaa-573a-98af-b715fe13ca77)
BOOK ONE (#uc0d975a5-2f9f-5a48-9cc5-aa26ff7c8fe5)
i spelt from Sibyl’s leaves (#uec1a6971-4043-55eb-854e-15f082e21962)
ii who’s that knocking at my door? (#ubfda9bdf-10b7-5733-8068-1a6d1192ebe7)
iii memories are made of this (#uba2d8726-4604-54d8-93af-db180a744cd3)
iv spelt from Sibyl’s leaves (#u9f4c0437-0ad8-5fbe-b11d-cb9254f57ff7)
v revenge and retribution (#u22a2d5c5-bbbe-5263-8792-4dbcced69961)
vi citizen’s arrest (#ud99b14d7-6460-5b9b-9242-c00a52748179)
vii a pint of guinness (#ub5ea5ac6-d579-5558-8adc-624f3b8e901b)
viii spelt from Sibyl’s leaves (#uf8a18fdd-6552-5d01-8642-eb1de9e13aef)
ix bag lady on a bike (#u100aa0a6-6ac3-5d0f-884c-8797ec1ab551)
x spelt from Sibyl’s leaves (#ub67ff668-7b3a-55cb-969b-d643b2dff8c7)
xi a game of hearts (#litres_trial_promo)
xii doppelgänger (#litres_trial_promo)
xiii the death of Marat (#litres_trial_promo)
xiv a man’s best friend (#litres_trial_promo)
xv spelt from Sibyl’s leaves (#litres_trial_promo)
xvi oats for St Uncumber (#litres_trial_promo)
xvii the juice of strawberries (#litres_trial_promo)
xviii the flowers that bloom in the spring, tra-la! (#litres_trial_promo)
xix pooh on the patio (#litres_trial_promo)
xx the last of the cobblers (#litres_trial_promo)
BOOK TWO (#litres_trial_promo)
i strange encounter (#litres_trial_promo)
ii drudgery divine (#litres_trial_promo)
iii the pavilion by the sea (#litres_trial_promo)
iv spelt from Sibyl’s leaves (#litres_trial_promo)
v realms of gold (#litres_trial_promo)
vi cheated by Protestants (#litres_trial_promo)
vii the sirens’ song (#litres_trial_promo)
viii we galloped all three (#litres_trial_promo)
ix coitus interruptus (#litres_trial_promo)
x belly or bollocks (#litres_trial_promo)
xi spelt from Sibyl’s leaves (#litres_trial_promo)
xii come to dust (#litres_trial_promo)
xiii faery lands forlorn (#litres_trial_promo)
xiv a face from the past (#litres_trial_promo)
xv bloody glass (#litres_trial_promo)
xvi a palomino pony (#litres_trial_promo)
xvii a formal complaint (#litres_trial_promo)
xviii the US cavalry (#litres_trial_promo)
xix I shall wound every man (#litres_trial_promo)
xx liberata liberata (#litres_trial_promo)
xxi an elfin storm (#litres_trial_promo)
xxii spelt from Sibyl’s leaves (#litres_trial_promo)
EPILEGOMENA (#litres_trial_promo)
Keep Reading (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
By Reginald Hill (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
PROLEGOMENA (#ulink_90e0b586-a353-5f46-ba19-8497cda3351a)
When I go to see my father, he doesn’t know me.
He’s away somewhere else in a strange land.
I tell myself it’s not all bad. He missed all that suffering when we thought Rosie was going to die. And all those refugees in Africa, and in Europe too, that we see streaming across our television screens, he doesn’t have to worry about them. Global warming, AIDS, the Euro, none of these impinges on his consciousness. He doesn’t even have to feel anxious about his roses when gales are forecast in July.
He sits here in the Home, like ignorance on a monument, smiling at nothing.
At least he’s content, the nurses tell us, and we tell them back, yes, at least he’s content.
Content to be nobody and nowhere.
But I have seen him outside of this room, this cocoon, with memories of somebody and somewhere still intermittent in his mind, staring in bewilderment at the woman who is both his wife and a complete stranger, pausing in the hallway of his own house, unable to recall if he’s heading for the kitchen or the garden and ignorant of which door to use if he does remember, crying out in terror as the dog which has been his most obedient servant for nearly ten years comes bounding towards him, barking its love.
Seeing him like this was bad.
But worse was waking in the night during and after Rosie’s illness, wondering if perhaps what we call Alzheimer’s – that condition in which the world becomes a vortex of fragments, a video loop of disconnected scenes, an absurdist drama full of actors pretending to be old friends and relations – wondering whether perhaps this is not a disease at all but merely a relaxing of some psychological censor which the self imposes to enable us to exist in a totally irrational universe.
Which would mean that dad and all the others are at last seeing things as they really are.
Unvirtual reality.
A sea of troubles.
Confused.
Inconsequential.
Fragments shored against a ruin.
Oh, Mistress Pascoe,
Laud we the gods, and let our crooked smokes climb to their nostrils for glad tidings do I bring and lucky joys. No more I fear the heat of the sun, as time which all these years has wasted me now sets me free, mosthappy news of price, but not for all, for does not time’s whirligig bring in revenges? Thou’rt much in my mind, nor shall I be content till I have seen thy face, when my full eyes shall witness bear to what my full heart feels. May my tears that fall prove holy water on thee! I must be brief, for though my enemies set me free, in freedom lies more danger than in prison, for here through thee and thine the world knows me in their care, but once enlarged, then am I at the mock of all disastrous chances and dangerous accidents by flood and field, with their hands whiter than the paper my obits are writ on and so must wear a mind dark as my fortune or my name. Fate leads me to your side but gives no date, for I must journey now by by-paths and indirect crook’d ways, but sometime sure, when you have quite forgot to look for me, a door shall open, and there shall I be, though you may know me not, but never fear, before I’m done you’ll know me through and through. Till then rest happy while I remain, though brown as earth, as bright unto my vows as faith can raise me.
Close by the margin of a lonely lake, shag-capped by pines that speared a lowering sky from which oozed light unclean whose lurid touch seemed rather to infect than luminate, a deep cave yawned.
Here four men laboured with shovels, their faces wrapped with scarves, not for disguise but as barrier against the stench of the decaying bat droppings they disturbed, while high above them a sea of leathery bodies rippled and whispered uneasily as the sound of digging and the glow of bull-lamps drifted up to the natural vault.
Outside two more men waited silently by a truck which looked almost too broad to have navigated the rutted track curving away like a railway tunnel into the crowding trees. Several yards away on a rocky ledge jutting out over the unmoving, unreflecting waters stood a dusty jeep.
Away to the east, dawn’s rosy fingers were already pulling aside the mists which shrouded the sleeping land, but here the exhalations of the lake still hung grey and heavy over the waters, the vehicle, and the waiting men.
At last from the cave’s black mouth two figures emerged, labouring under the weight of a long metal box they carried between them.
They set it down on the ground behind the truck. One of the waiting men, his thinning yellow hair clinging to his brow like straw to a milkmaid’s buttocks, stooped to unlock the container. Glancing up at the other man from black and bulging eyes, he paused like a vampiricide about to open a coffin, then flung back the lid.
The other man, slim and dark with a narrow moustache, looked down at the oiled and gleaming tubes of metal for a moment, then nodded. The first man snapped his fingers and the diggers closed the box and lifted it onto the back of the truck. Then they returned to the cave, passing en route their two companions staggering out with a second box.
Many times was this journey made, and while the labourers laboured, the watchers went round to the front of the truck and the slim man opened the passenger door, reached inside and picked up a large square leather case which he set on the seat and opened.
The straw-haired, bulging-eyed man produced a flattened cylinder of ivory and pressed a stud to release a long, slightly curved blade. Delicately he nicked two of the plastic containers which packed the case, licked his index finger, inserted it into the first incision, tasted the powder which clung to his damp flesh, repeated the process with the second, and nodded his accord.
The dark man closed the case then took the other’s outstretched hand.
‘Nice to do business,’ said bulging eyes. ‘My best to young Kansas.’
The other looked puzzled for a moment then smiled. The older man too had a speculative look on his face as he held onto the other’s hand rather longer than necessary. Then he too smiled and shook his head as though to dislodge a misplaced thought, let go and took the grip to the jeep where he laid it on the back seat.
By now the loading of the truck was complete and the four diggers stretched their aching limbs in the mouth of the cave and unwound their protecting scarves. Two were ruddy-faced with their exertions, the other two flushed dark beneath their sallow skins.
The first pair went towards the jeep while the second pair joined the slim man who was securing the tailgate of the truck.
These two looked at each other, exchanged a brief eye signal, then reached for the holsters beneath their arms, drew out automatic pistols, and moved towards the jeep, firing as they walked. The two ruddy-faced diggers took the bullets in their backs and pitched forward on their faces while ahead of them the straw-haired man fell backwards, his eyes popping even further in astonishment under the fillet of blood which wrapped itself around his brow.
One of the gunmen continued to the jeep and leaned into it to retrieve the grip. His companion meanwhile turned back to the truck where the slim man was standing as if paralysed.
‘Chiquillo!’ he called. ‘Recuerdo de Jorge. Adiós!’ And let go a long burst.
The slim man felt a whip of hot pain along his ribcage which sent him spinning like a top behind the truck. The rest of the burst went straight through the mouth of the cave where the bullets ricocheted around the granite walls and up into the high vault, triggering first a rustling ripple, then a squeaking, wing-beating eruption of bats.
The gunman paused, looking up in wonderment as the bats skeined out of their rocky roost and smudged the dark air overhead. So many. Who would have thought there would be so many?
Then as they vanished among the trees he resumed his advance.
But the pause had been long enough for the slim man to reach under the truck and drag down the weapon taped beneath the wheel arch.
He shot the gunman through the leg as he passed by the truck’s rear wheel, then through the head as he crashed to the ground.
The second gunman dropped the grip and crouched low with his weapon aimed towards his dying companion.
But the slim man came rolling out of the other side of the truck, and gave himself time to take aim and make sure his first shot found its target.
The second gunman held his crouching position for a moment, then toppled slowly sideways and lay there, gently twitching, his visible eye fixed on the trees’ high vault. The slim man approached carefully, one arm wrapped round his bleeding side, and emptied the clip into the watching eye.
Then he sat down on the grip and pulled open his shirt to examine his wound.
It was more painful than life-threatening, flesh laid bare, a rib nicked perhaps, no deeper penetration. But blood was pouring out and by the time he’d bound it up with strips of shirt torn from the dead gunman at his feet, he’d lost a lot of blood.
He opened the grip, took out one of the packets the pop-eyed man had nicked, poured some of the powder into his hand, raised it to his nose and took a long hard sniff.
Then he took out a mobile phone and dialled.
‘Soy yo… si… I did not think so soon… si…poco… not so wide as a barn door… the CP… it has to be… I am sorry… dos horas… quizá tres… si… at the CP… si, bueno… te quiero… adiós.’
He put the phone away and picked up the grip, wincing with pain. As he moved away, he thought he sensed a movement from the vicinity of the jeep and turned with his gun waving menacingly.
All was still. He hadn’t the strength for closer investigation. And in any case, his gun was empty.
He resumed his progress to the truck.
Getting the grip into the driver’s cab and himself after it was an agony. He sat there for a while, leaning against the wheel. Did something move by the jeep or was it his pain giving false life to this deadly tableau? Certainly in the air above, the bats, reassured by the return of stillness, were flitting back into the mouth of the cave.
He dipped into the grip again, sniffed a little more powder.
Then he switched on the engine, engaged gear, and without a backward glance at the gaping cave, the gloomy lake or the bodies that lay between them, he sent the truck rumbling into the dark tunnel curving away through the crowding trees.
High on the sunlit, windswept Snake Pass which links Lancashire with Yorkshire, Peter Pascoe thought, I’m in love.
Even with a trail of blood running from her nose over the double hump of her full lips to peter out on her charming chin, she was grin-like-an-idiot-gorgeous.
‘You OK?’ he said, grinning like an idiot till he realized that in the circumstances this was perhaps not the most appropriate expression.
‘Yes, yes,’ she said impatiently, dabbing at her nose with a tissue. ‘Is this going to take long?’
The driver of her taxi, to whom the question was addressed, looked from the bent and leaking radiator of his vehicle to the jackknifed lorry he had hit and said sarcastically, ‘Soon as I repair this and get that shifted, we’ll be on our way, luv.’
Pascoe, returning from Manchester over the Snake, had been behind the lorry when it jackknifed. Simple humanitarian concern had brought him running to see if anyone was hurt, but now his sense of responsibility as a policeman was taking over. He pulled out his mobile, dialled 999 and gave a succinct account of what had happened.
‘Better set up traffic diversions way back on both sides,’ he said. ‘The road’s completely blocked till you get something up here to shift the lorry. One injury. Passenger in the taxi banged her nose. Lorry driver probably suffering from shock. Better have an ambulance.’
‘Not for me,’ said the woman vehemently. ‘I’m fine.’
She rose from the verge where she’d been sitting and moved forward on long legs, whose slight unsteadiness only added to their sinuous attraction. She looked as if she purposed to move the lorry single-handed. If it had been sentient, she might have managed it, thought Pascoe.
‘Silly cow’d have been all right if she’d put her seat belt on like I told her,’ said the taxi driver.
‘Perhaps you should have been firmer,’ said Pascoe mildly. ‘Who is she? Where’re you headed?’
No reason why he should have asked or the driver answered these questions, but without his being aware of it, over the years Pascoe had developed a quiet authority of manner which most people found harder to resist than mere assertiveness.
The driver pulled out a docket and said, ‘Miss Kelly Cornelius. Manchester Airport. Terminal Three. She’s going to miss her plane.’
He spoke with a satisfaction which identified him as one of that happily vanishing species, the Ur-Yorkshireman, beside whom even Andy Dalziel appeared a creature of sweetness and light. Only a hardcore misogynist could take pleasure in anything which caused young Miss Cornelius distress.
And she was distressed. She returned from her examination of the lorry and gave Pascoe a look of such expressive unhappiness, his empathy almost caused him to burst into tears.
‘Excuse me,’ she said in a melodious voice in which all that was best of American lightness, Celtic darkness, and English woodnotes wild, conjoined to make sweet moan, ‘but your car’s on the other side of this, I guess.’
‘Yes, I’m on my way home to Mid-Yorkshire,’ he said. ‘Looks like I’ll have to turn around and find another way.’
‘That’s what I thought you’d do,’ she said, her voice breathless with delight, as if he’d just confirmed her estimate of his intellectual brilliance. ‘And I was wondering, I know it’s quite a long way back, but how would you feel about taking me to Manchester Airport? I hate to be a nuisance, but you see, I’ve got this plane to catch, and if I miss it, I don’t know what I’ll do.’
Tears brimmed her big dark eyes. Pascoe could imagine their salty taste on his tongue. What she was asking was of course impossible, but (as he absolutely intended to tell Ellie later when he cleansed his conscience by laundering his prurient thoughts in her sight) it was flattering to be asked.
He said, ‘I’m sorry, but my wife’s expecting me.’
‘You could ring her. You’ve got a phone,’ she said with tremulous appeal. ‘I’d be truly, deeply, madly grateful.’
This was breathtaking, in every sense.
He said, ‘Surely there’ll be another plane. Where are you going anyway?’
Silly question. It implied negotiation.
There was just the hint of a hesitation before she answered, ‘Corfu. It’s my holiday, first for years. And it’s a holiday charter, so if I miss it, there won’t be much chance of getting on another, they’re all so crowded this time of year. And I’m meeting my sister and her little boy at the airport, and she’s disabled and won’t get on the plane without me, so it’ll be all our holidays ruined. Please.’
Suddenly he knew he was going to do it. All right, it was crazy, but he was going to have to go back all the way to Glossop anyway and the airport wasn’t much further, well, not very much further…
He said, ‘I’ll need to phone my wife.’
‘That’s marvellous. Oh, thank you, thank you!’
She gave him a smile which made all things seem easy – the drive back, the phone call to Ellie, everything – then dived into the taxi and emerged with a small leather case like a pilot’s flight bag.
Travelling light, thought Pascoe as he stepped back to get some privacy for his call home. The woman was now talking to the taxi driver and presumably paying him off. There seemed to be some disagreement. Pascoe guessed the driver was demanding the full agreed fare on the grounds that it wasn’t his fault he hadn’t got her all the way to Terminal 3.
Terminal 3.
Last time he’d flown out of Manchester, Terminal 3 had been for British Airways and domestic flights only.
You couldn’t fly charter to Corfu from there.
Perhaps the driver had made a mistake.
Or perhaps things had changed at Manchester in the past six months.
But now he was recalling the slight hesitancy before the sob story. And would a young woman on holiday really travel so light…?
Pascoe, he said to himself, you’re developing a nasty suspicious policeman’s mind.
He turned away and began to punch buttons on his phone.
When it was answered he identified himself, talked for a while, then waited.
In the distance he heard the wail of sirens approaching.
A voice spoke in his ear. He listened, asked a couple of questions, then rang off.
When he turned, Kelly Cornelius was standing by the taxi, smiling expectantly at him. A police car pulled up onto the verge beside him. An ambulance wasn’t far behind.
As the driver of the police car opened his door to get out, Pascoe stooped to him. Screened by the car, he pulled out his ID, showed it to the uniformed constable and spoke urgently.
Then he straightened up, waved apologetically to the waiting woman, flourishing his phone as if to say he hadn’t been able to get through before.
He began to dial again, watching as the policemen went across to the taxi and started talking to the driver and the woman.
‘Hi,’ said Pascoe. ‘It’s me. Yes, I’m on my way but there’s been an accident… no, I’m not involved but I am stuck, the road’s blocked, and I’m going to have to divert… yeah, take me when I come… give Rosie a kiss… how’s she been today?… yes, I know, it’s early days… it’ll be OK, I promise… love you… ’bye.’
He switched off and went back to the taxi.
‘What the hell do you mean, I can’t go?’ the young woman was demanding. Anger like injury did nothing to detract from her beauty.
‘Sorry, miss,’ said the policeman stolidly. ‘Can’t let you leave the scene of an accident where someone’s been injured.’
‘But I’m the one who’s been injured so if I say it doesn’t matter…’
‘Doesn’t work like that,’ said the policeman. ‘Need to get you checked out at hospital. There may be claims. Also you’re a witness. We’ll need a statement.’
‘But I’ve got a plane to catch.’ Her gaze met Pascoe’s. ‘Corfu. It’s my holiday.’
A sharp intake of breath from the policeman.
‘Certainly can’t let you leave the country, miss, that’s definite,’ he said. ‘Here’s the ambulance lads now. Why not let them give you the once-over while I talk to these other gents?’
Pascoe caught her eye and shrugged helplessly. She looked back at him, her face (still beautiful) now ravaged with shock and betrayal, as Andromeda might have looked if Perseus, on point of rescuing her from the ravening dragon, had suddenly remembered a previous appointment.
‘Well, if you’re done with me, Officer, I think I’d better start finding another route home,’ he said, looking away, unable to bear that devastatingly devastated expression.
The constable said, ‘Right, sir. We’ve got your name in case we need to be in touch. Goodbye now.’
As he made his way back to his car, Pascoe reflected on the paradox that now he felt much more guilty about Kelly Cornelius than he had before, when it had just been a question of simple reflexive desire.
Women, he thought as he sat in his car and put the necessary enquiries in train. Women! All of them queens of discord, blessed with the power even on the slightest acquaintance to get in a man’s mind and divide and rule. Look at him now, sitting here when he should be heading home, checking out his vague suspicions like a good professional, uncertain whether he would be bothering if he hadn’t felt so ready to submit to this lovely creature’s control, with part of him hoping even as he started the process that he was going to come out of this looking a real dickhead.
Women. How come they didn’t rule the universe?
COMFORT BLANKET
Arms and the Men they sang, who played at Troy
Until they broke it like a spoiled child’s Toy
Then sailed away, the Winners heading home,
The Losers to a new Play-pen called Rome.
Behind, like Garbage from their vessels flung,
– Submiss, submerged, but certainly not sung –
A wake of Women trailed in long Parade,
The reft, the raped, the slaughtered, the betrayed.
Oh, Shame! that so few sagas celebrate
Their Pain, their Perils, their no less moving Fate!
But mine won’t either, for why should it when
The proper Study of Mendacity is MEN?
BOOK ONE (#ulink_b12c08d2-2b6d-5a29-beca-f77ced5eff70)
‘Your pretty daughter,’ she said, ‘starts to hear of such things. Yet,’ looking full upon her, ‘you may be sure that there are men and women already on their road, who have their business to do with you, and who will do it. Of a certainty they will do it. They may be coming hundreds, thousands, of miles over the sea there; they may be close at hand now; they may be coming, for anything you know, or anything you can do to prevent it, from the vilest sweepings of this very town.’
CHARLES DICKENS: Little Dorrit
i
spelt from Sibyl’s leaves (#ulink_ff097a81-f5b7-5e4d-b4e8-3ec0b1256b90)
Eleanor Soper…
The little patch of blue I can see through the high round window is probably the sky, but it could just as well be a piece of blue backcloth or a painted flat.
licks up the blood from the square where a riot has been…
Distantly I hear a clatter of hooves. They’re changing guard at… I’ve heard them do it thousands of times. But hearing’s as far as it goes. They could be mere sound effects, played on tape. You don’t take anything on trust in this business. Not even your friends. Especially not them.
I who know everything knew nothing till I knew that.
what does it mean?…
The only unquestionable reality lies in the machine.
But while reality hardly changes at all, the machine has changed a lot. It grows young as I grow old.
Shall I like my namesake grow old forever?
My namesake, I say. After so long usage, am I beginning to believe as so many of the young ones clearly believe that my name really is Sibyl? Strange that the name my parents gave me also labelled me as a woman of magic, but an enchantress as well as a seer. Morgan. Morgan Meredith. Morgan le Fay, as Gaw used to call me in the days of his enchantment.
But now my enchanting days are over. And it was Gaw who rechristened me when he saw that I had no magic to counter the sickness in my blood.
A wise man hides his mistakes in plain sight, then over long time slowly corrects them.
My dear old friend Gawain Clovis Sempernel is a wise man. No one would deny it. Not if they’ve any sense.
Aroynt thee, hag. Ripeness is all. And I have work to do.
When I first took on my sacred office, the machine loomed monumentally, like a Victorian family tomb. Thirty years on, it’s smaller than an infant’s casket, leaving plenty of room on the narrow tabletop for my flask and mug, and also my inhaler and pill dispenser, though generally I keep these hidden. Sounds silly when you’re in a wheelchair, but I was brought up to believe you don’t advertise your frailties.
That’s a lesson a lot of folk never learn, which is why so many of them end up frozen in my electronic casket where there’s always room for plenty more.
If I wanted I could ask it to tell me exactly how many people had passed through my hands, or rather my fingertips, for that’s the closest I get to actually handling people. But I don’t bother. This isn’t about statistics, this is about individuals.
Eleanor Soper…
My casket is also an incubator. Here they make their first appearance, often looking completely helpless and harmless. But, oh, how quickly they grow, and I oversee their progress with an almost parental pride as their details accumulate and their files fatten out.
Some live up to their promise. (By which I mean threat!)
Others, apparently, change direction completely. Such converts I always regard with grave suspicion, even if – especially if – they make it to the very top. They’re either faking it, in which case we’re ready for them. Or they’re genuine, which means the contents of these files could be a serious embarrassment.
It’s always nice to know you can embarrass your masters.
But the great majority merely fade away, become ghosts of their vibrant young selves.
married a cop, had a kid, didn’t march any more…
what was it for?
Let’s take a look at your protesting career, Eleanor Pascoe née Soper.
Amnesty – member, non-active; Anti-Fascist Action – lapsed; Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament – lapsed; Gay Rights – lapsed; Graduates Against God – lapsed; Greenpeace – member, non-active; Labour Party –member, non-active; Liberata Trust –member, active; Quis Custodiet? – lapsed; Third World United – lapsed; Women’s Rights Action Group – lapsed; World Socialist Alliance – lapsed.
Once you squawked so loud in your incubator, Eleanor, now you rest so quiet.
Gaw Sempernel (let no dog bark) says there is nothing so suspicious as silence. Must have watched a lot of cowboy films in his youth. It’s quiet out there, Gaw… too damn quiet!
Certainly neither sound nor silence gets you out of my casket. Once inside, there you stay forever. And if your presence is ever needed, you can be conjured up in a trice, like the wraiths of the classical underworld, which, as my classically educated Gawain likes to remind me, were summoned to appear and to speak by the smell and the taste of fresh blood.
For machines may change, and fashions change, and human flesh, God help us, changes most inevitably of all.
But some people, my people, have at their hearts something which refuses to change, despite all that life shows them by way of contra-evidence. Perhaps it is a genetic weakness. Certainly, once established, like the common cold, no one has yet found a way of eradicating it.
Which is why I, practising what I preach, have demonstrated to the world (or that section of it which shares this remote and lonely building in the heart of this populous city), that there is life after death by staying in gainful employment all these years, Sibyl the Sibyl, sitting here in my solitary cell, hung high in my lonely cage, laying the bodies out neatly in my electronic casket, and, when necessary, conjuring them back to life.
My poor benighted ghosts scenting blood once more…
Like Eleanor Soper.
All these looney people, where do they all come from?
All these looney people, where do they all belong?
ii
who’s that knocking at my door? (#ulink_467e279c-433a-5aa9-a6fd-aef9ff753b51)
…why should it, when
The proper study of mendacity is MEN?
Chapter 1
It was a dark and stormy night.
Now, why has that gone down in the annals as the archetype of the rotten opening? she wondered. It’s not much different from It was a bright cold day in April, though, fair do’s, the bit about the clocks striking thirteen grabs the attention. Or how about There was no possibility of taking a walk that day, with all the stuff about the weather that follows? And even Homer’s jam-packed with meteorology. OK, so what follows in every case is a lot better book than Paul Clifford, but even if we stick to the same author, surely the dark and stormy stuff isn’t in the same league as the opening of The Last Days of Pompeii (which, interestingly, I found on Andy Dalziel’s bedside table when I used a search for the loo as an excuse to do a bit of nebbing! Riddle me that, my Trinity scholar!).
How does it go? ‘Ho, Diomed, well met! Do you sup with Glaucus tonight?’ said a young man of small stature, who wore his tunic in the loose and effeminate folds which proved him to be a gentleman and a coxcomb. Now that is positively risible, while the dark and stormy night is simply a cliché which, like all clichés, was at its creation bright new coin.
So up yours, all you superior bastards who get on the media chat shows. I’m sticking with it!
It was a dark and stormy night. The wind was blowing off the sea and the guard commander bowed into it with his cloak wrapped around his face as he left the shelter of the grove and began to clamber up to the headland.
The darkness was deep but not total. There was salt and spume in the wind giving it a ghostly visibility, and now a huge flock of white sea birds riding the blast went screeching by only a few feet over his head.
The superstitious fools huddled round their fires in the camp below would probably take them as an omen and argue over which god was telling them what and pour out enough libations to get the whole of Olympus pissed. But the commander didn’t even flinch.
As he neared the crest of the headland, hescrewed up his eyes and peered ahead, looking for a darker outline against the black sky which should show where the wind wrapped itself around the sentry. There’d been grumblings among the weary crewmen when he’d insisted on posting a full contingent of perimeter guards. In the forty-eight hours since they made landfall, they’d found no sign of human habitation, and with the storm which had made them run for shelter blowing as hard as ever, the threat of a seaborne attack seemed negligible. With the democracy of shared hardship, they’d even appealed over his head to the Prince.
‘So you feel safe?’ he’d said. ‘Is that more safe or less safe than when you saw the Greek ships sail away?’
That had shut them up. But the commander had resolved to make the rounds himself to check that none of the posted sentries, feeling secure in the pseudo-isolation of the storm, had opted for comfort rather than watch.
And it seemed his distrust was justified. His keen gaze found no sign of any human figure on the skyline. Then a small movement at ground level caught his straining eyes. Cautiously he advanced. The movement again. And now he could make out the figure of a man stretched out on his stomach right at the cliff’s edge.
Silently he drew his sword and moved closer. If the idle bastard had fallen asleep he was in for a painful reveille. But when he was only a paceaway, his foot kicked a stone and the sentry’s head turned and their eyes met.
Far from showing alarm, the man looked relieved. He laid a finger over his lips, then motioned to the commander to join him prostrate.
When they were side by side, the sentry put his mouth to his ear and said, ‘I think there’s someone down there, Commander.’
It didn’t seem likely, but this was a battle-scarred veteran who’d spent ten years patrolling the Wall, not some fresh-faced kid who saw a bear in every bush.
Cautiously he wriggled forward till his head was over the edge and looked down.
He knew from memory that the rocky cliff fell sheer for at least eighty feet down to a tiny shingly cove, but now it was like looking into hellmouth, where Pyriphlegethon’s burning waves drive their phosphorescent crests deep into the darkness of woeful Acheron.
Nothing could live down there, nothing that still had dependence on light and air anyway, and he was moving back to give the sentry a tongue-lashing when suddenly the wind tore a huge hole in the cloud cover and a full moon lit up the scene like a thousand lanterns.
Now he saw, though he could hardly believe what he saw.
The waves had momentarily retreated to reveal the figure of a man crawling out of the sea. Then the gale sent its next wall of water rushing forwardand the figure was buried beneath it. Impossible to survive, he thought. But when the sea receded, it was still there, hands and feet dug deep into the shingle. And in the few seconds of respite given by the withdrawing waters, the man scrambled forward another couple of feet before sinking his anchors once again.
Sometimes the suction of the retreating waves was too strong, or his anchorage was too shallow, and the recumbent body was drawn back the full length of its advance. But always when it seemed certain that the ocean must have driven deep into his lungs, or the razor-edged shingle must have ripped his naked chest wide open, the figure pushed itself forward once more.
‘He’ll never make it,’ said the sentry with utter assurance.
The guard commander watched a little while longer then said, ‘Six to four he does. In gold.’
The veteran looked down at the sea which now seemed to be clutching at the body on the beach with a supernatural fury. It looked like a sure-fire bet, but he had a lot of respect for the commander’s judgement.
‘Silver,’ he compromised.
They settled to watch.
It took another half-hour for the commander to win his bet, but finally the crawling man had dragged himself right up to the foot of the cliff where a couple of huge boulders resting on the beach formed a protective wall against which thesea dashed its mountainous missiles in vain. For a while he lay there, still immersed in water from time to time, but no longer at risk of being either beaten flat or dragged back into the depths. Then, just when the sentry was hoping he might claim victory in the bet by reason of the man’s death, he sat upright.
‘That sod must be made of bronze and bear hide,’ said the sentry with reluctant admiration. ‘What the fuck’s he doing now?’
For the figure on the beach had pushed himself to his feet, and as the waters drew back, he emerged from his rocky refuge and, to the observers’ amazement, began a kind of lumbering dance, following the receding waves, then backpedalling like mad as they drove forward once more. And all the while he was gesticulating, sometimes putting his left hand in the crook of his right elbow and thrusting his right fist into the air, sometimes putting both his thumbs into his mouth, then pulling them out with great force and stabbing his forefingers seawards, and shouting.
‘I’ve seen that before,’ said the sentry. ‘That’s what them bastards used to do under the Wall.’
‘Hush! I’m trying to hear what he’s saying,’ said the commander.
As if in response, the wind fell for a moment and the sea drew back to its furthest point yet, still pursued by the dancing man whose shouts now drifted clearly up the cliff face.
‘Up yours, old man!’ he yelled. ‘Call yourselfearthshaker? You couldn’t shake your dick at a pisspot! So what are you going to do now, you watery old git? Ha ha! Right up yours!’
‘You’re right. He’s a Greek,’ said the commander.
‘Better still, he’s a dead Greek,’ said the veteran with some satisfaction.
For in his growing boldness, the dancing man had allowed himself to be lured far away from his protective wall by this moment of comparative calm, so when the ocean suddenly exploded before him, he had no hope of getting back to safety. An avalanche of water far greater than anything before descended on him, driving him to the ground, then burying him deep. And at the same time the renewed fury of the wind sewed up the rent in the cloud and darkness fell.
‘If he was talking to who I think he was talking to, he was a right idiot,’ said the sentry piously. ‘You gotta give the gods respect else they’ll chew you up and spit you out.’
The commander smiled.
‘Let’s see,’ he said.
They didn’t have long to wait. As though the storm also wanted to look at the results of its latest onslaught, it tore aside the clouds once more.
‘Well, bull my bollocks and call me Zeus!’ exclaimed the sentry, his recent piety completely forgotten.
There he was again, almost back where he’d started but still alive. Once more he started tostruggle back over the beach. Only now as the waves retreated, they didn’t leave any area of visible shingle but a foot or so of water. This made the anchoring process much more difficult, but at the same time, by permitting the man to take a couple of swimming strokes with his muscular arms, it speeded his return to the safety of the boulders. Here he squatted, his head slumped on his broad chest which rose and fell as he drew in great breaths of damp air.
‘He’s game,’ said the sentry grudgingly. ‘Got to give him that. But he’s not out of trouble yet. How high do you reckon the tide comes in here, Commander?’
‘Normally? I think it would just about reach the bottom of the cliff, a foot up at its highest. But this isn’t normal. I don’t know whether it’s a very angry god or just very bad weather, but I’d say the way this wind’s blowing the sea in, it will be thirty feet up the cliff face in an hour.’
‘So that really is it,’ said the sentry with some satisfaction.
‘Not necessarily. He can climb.’
‘Up that rock face? Get on! It’s smooth and it’s sheer and there’s an overhang at the top. I wouldn’t fancy my chances there at my peak on a fine day, and that old bugger must be completely knackered.’
‘Double or quits on what you owe?’ said the commander casually.
The sentry turned his head to look at the officer’sprofile, but it was as blank and unreadable as the cliff face, and not a lot more attractive either.
Then he looked down. The man was up to his knees in water already.
‘Done,’ said the sentry.
Below, the Greek was examining the cliff face. His features were undiscernible through a heavy tangle of beard, but even at this distance they could see the eyes shining brightly in the reflection of the moonlight. He rubbed his hands vigorously against the remnants of his robe in what had to be a vain attempt to get them dry, then he reached up and began to climb.
He got about three feet above the water level before he lost his grip and slithered back down. Three more times he tried, three more times he fell. And each time he hit the water, it was higher than before.
‘Looks like we’re quits, Commander,’ said the sentry.
‘Maybe.’
‘What’s the silly old sod doing now?’
The silly old sod was ripping the sleeves off his tattered robe, and tying them to form a rough sack which he hung on a jag of rock protruding from one of his protective boulders. Next he knelt down in the water facing the boulder, took a deep breath, and plunged his head beneath the surface. When he emerged, he tossed what looked like a stone into the dangling sack. Again and again he did this.
‘I know,’ said the sentry. ‘He’s digging a tunnel.’
He laughed raucously at his own wit till the guard commander said coldly, ‘Shut up. You might learn something.’
The sentry stopped laughing. Shared hardship might relax the bonds of discipline slightly, but he and his comrades knew just how far they could go.
Finally the Greek stood upright once more, slung the sack around his neck, put both hands into it, then reached up the cliff face. He seemed to lean against it for a long moment, almost as if he were praying. Then he began to climb again.
The sentry waited for him to fall. But he didn’t. From time to time he dipped into his sack, then reached up again in search of another handhold. As on the beach, progress was painfully slow, and occasionally one of his holds failed and he’d slip back a little, but still he kept coming.
‘How in the name of Zeus is he doing that?’ said the sentry. ‘It’s just not possible!’
‘Molluscs,’ said the commander.
‘No need to be like that, sir,’ said the sentry resentfully. ‘I was only asking.’
‘I said, molluscs. Clams, mussels, oysters, anything he could find. He’s holding them against the wall till their suckers take a hold. Then he uses them as a ladder.’
‘Clams, you say? Them things couldn’t hold a man, surely?’
‘Three might. He only moves one foot or hand at a time. And he’s using any holds he can find in the rock face too. He’s a truly ingenious fellow.’
The sentry shook his head in reluctant admiration. As if taking this as confirmation that their prey was close to escaping them, the waves hurled themselves with renewed force against the cliff, breaking over the climbing man and spraying flakes of spume over the watchers above.
A harsh grating noise reached them also.
‘The bugger’s laughing!’ said the sentry.
‘Of course he’s laughing. He wants the cliff face to be as wet as possible. That’s the way the molluscs like it. The wetter the surface, the tighter their grip.’
The wind closed the gap in the clouds once more. This, coupled with the fact that the climber was now approaching the overhang, took him out of the watchers’ sight. The sentry pushed himself back from the edge, squatted to his haunches and drew his sword.
‘Let’s see if he’s still laughing when he sticks his head over the top and I cut his throat,’ he said, testing the metal’s edge with his thumb.
The guard commander said nothing but squatted beside him. They had to lean into the wind to avoid being blown backwards and from time to time their faces were lashed with salt water as the ocean rose to new heights of fury in its efforts to wash the climber free.
Minutes passed. The watchers didn’t move. Theyhad had years to learn that patience too is one of the great military arts.
Finally the sentry’s face began to show his suspicion that the sea must after all have won its battle against the climbing Greek. He glanced at the guard commander. But his was a face as jagged and pocked as a city wall after long siege, and quite unreadable at the best of times, so the sentry didn’t risk speaking and returned to his watch.
A few moments later he was glad of his self-restraint. A new sound drifted up the cliff face amidst the lash of water and howl of wind. It was the noise of laboured breathing, getting closer.
The sentry began to smile in happy anticipation. He decided not just to slit the throat but to have a go at taking the whole head off. It would be fun to go back into the camp and toss it down among his half-waking comrades and say negligently, ‘Got myself another Greek while you idle sods were sleeping.’
The breathing was loud now. The sentry moved his position so that he was right above it. An arm like a small tree trunk was swung up to rest on the edge of the cliff, and then a shag of salt-caked hair appeared, and finally the man’s head came fully into view and a pair of deep-sunk, intensely blue eyes took in the waiting men.
‘How do, chuck,’ said the Greek.
The sentry rocked forward on his toes and shot out his left hand to grab the grizzled hair. Butquick as he moved, the Greek was quicker. His other hand came into view, grasping a large jagged clamshell. It snaked out almost faster than the eye could follow, and the next moment the sentry’s left wrist was slit through to the bone.
He fell backward, shrieking. His right hand released his sword as he grasped the gaping wound to staunch the spurting blood. The Greek dropped the shell and reached out to pick up the fallen weapon. Then a heavy-shod foot crashed down on his forearm and pinned it to the ground.
He looked up at the unreadably rugged face of the guard commander and smiled through his tangle of beard.
‘Thanks, chuck,’ he said. ‘Saved me from a nasty fall.’
‘Kill the bastard, Commander,’ urged the ashen-faced sentry. ‘Chop his fucking arm right off!’
The commander was aware of the blue eyes fixed quizzically on his face as he debated the matter.
‘Not yet,’ he said finally. ‘Not till we know if there are any more of his kind about. Besides, the men need cheering up after what’s happened recently, and I reckon a clever old Greek like this will take a long time dying.’
‘Long as you like, Captain,’ said the Greek. ‘I’m in no hurry whatsoever. I’ll
‘Shit,’ said Ellie Pascoe.
Through the open window of the boxroom which she refused to dignify with the name study she had heard a car turning into their short drive.
She finished reading, take as long as ever you like.’, pressed Save to preserve her corrections and went to the window.
A man and a woman were getting out of the car and heading for the front door.
‘Hello,’ called Ellie.
This voice from above made them start like guilty things surprised, and the woman dropped her car keys.
Perhaps they think it’s the voice of God, thought Ellie.
Or perhaps (one thought leading to another) they think they are the voice of God.
‘If you’re Witnesses,’ she called, ‘I think I should tell you we’re all communist satanists here. I’ll be happy to send you some of our literature.’
‘Mrs Pascoe?’ said the woman. ‘Mrs Ellie Pascoe?’
She didn’t look like a Witness. And Witnesses didn’t drive big BMWs.
A pair of assertions as unsupported as a Hottentot’s tits (she plucked the phrase from her collection of Andy Dalziel memorabilia), but evidence is what we look for when intuition fails (one of her constabulary-baiting own).
‘Hang on. I’ll come down,’ she said.
By the time she got downstairs and opened the front door, the couple had recovered their composure. Now they just looked concerned.
‘Mrs Pascoe?’ said the man, who was slim, thirtyish, not bad-looking and wearing a rather nice Prince of Wales check suit which looked like it had been cut in Savile Row. Would look even nicer on Peter. ‘You are Mrs Pascoe?’
‘I thought we’d established that.’
‘My name’s Jim Westcombe. I’m with the council’s Education Welfare Department. It’s about your daughter, Rose. She’s at Edengrove Junior, isn’t she?’
‘Yes, but not today. I mean, it’s their end-of-term trip to Tegley Hall Theme Park… look, what’s this about?’ Ellie demanded.
The man and woman looked at each other, then the man went on, ‘Honestly, there’s nothing to worry about, she’s fine, you’re not to worry, really…’
‘What?’
There are few things more worrying to a mother than being told not to worry, especially a mother who a few short weeks ago was sitting by a hospital bed, not knowing if her child was going to recover from meningitis or not.
The woman gave her a look which combined empathy of her feelings and exasperation at her companion’s heavy-handedness.
‘Jim, shut up,’ she said. ‘Mrs Pascoe, the coach taking the children to Tegley has broken down. There’s a replacement coach on the way, but it seems your little girl wasn’t feeling too well and the head teacher thought it best to make arrangements to get her home, only when he tried to ring you he couldn’t get through…’
Ellie turned and grabbed the hall phone. It was dead. In the mirror hanging above the phone, she saw an unrecognizably pale face whose pallor shone through her summer tan like a corpse-light through muslin. This was it. This was the punishment she deserved. She had brought it on herself… worse… on Rosie… on Peter…
‘… so he tried your husband but he wasn’t available, so then he rang into the Education office and as Jim and I were coming out this way and would be passing your road end, we said we’d call and check if you were in.’
‘Oh God,’ said Ellie.
I’m confused, she thought. I’m not hearing properly.
She leaned against the door frame to steady herself and the woman reached forward to rest her hand on Ellie’s arm and said, ‘Really, it’s OK, Mrs Pascoe. You know how it is, end of term, kids getting excited, rushing around like mad. I’ve got two myself, I know how they can keep us frightened, believe me. It’s just a matter of getting out there to pick the little girl up. Have you got your car here? Jim can go with you, he knows where the breakdown happened. I can’t come myself, I’m afraid. I’ve got an urgent appointment, but Jim can spare a couple of hours, can’t you, Jim? He’ll even drive if you don’t feel up to it.’
‘Surely,’ said the man. ‘No problem at all. Let’s get started, shall we? Sooner we’re on the way, sooner you can get your little girl home.’
Ellie took a deep breath. It wasn’t enough. She took another. It was like squirting oil onto a piece of rusty machinery. She could almost hear the gears of her mind starting to grate against each other as she reviewed everything that had been said to her.
She said, ‘Sorry. This has knocked me out. I’m not usually so slow. It was just a bit of a shock. I thought you were trying to tell me there’s been an accident…’
‘Nothing like that,’ said the woman. ‘Really.’
‘And did you talk to Mr Johnson, the head, yourself? You’re sure he said it was nothing to worry about?’
‘Yes, I spoke direct with Mr Johnson,’ said the woman firmly. ‘Just a tummy bug, he reckoned. But she really wants to be home rather than bumping around on a bus all day.’
‘And if it was anything more serious, the sooner we get out there, the better, eh?’ said the man heartily.
‘Jim, please!’ said the woman reprimandingly.
‘No, it’s OK,’ said Ellie, stepping forward and smiling at the man. ‘It’s always best to be ready for the worst. Are you ready, Mr Westcombe?’
Then she brought her knee up as hard as she could between his legs.
It was good to see his face drain pale as her own.
Now she swung her right arm round hard at the woman’s neck. The blow would probably have felled her, but she was quick and ducked low, though not low enough to avoid all contact. Ellie’s hand caught her on the temple just above the right eye with enough force to send her reeling back into the Climbing Pompon de Paris growing up the pillar to the left of the front porch.
When Ellie had bought it, Peter had grumbled that nowadays it was surely possible to get a less prickly, more user-friendly rose, but she’d been unrepentant. The tiny pink pompom blossoms had been her father’s favourite before Alzheimer’s robbed him of even that. And now, as she heard the woman scream, Ellie knew she’d always love the thorns too.
She retreated over her threshold and slammed the door shut. Ramming the bolts home, she became aware of pain in her right wrist, and as she slid to the floor with her back against the door, in her right knee too. She sat there, breathing deep, as if she’d just run a hundred metres up a steep hill. Outside she heard car doors shut and an engine start up and reverse away.
She sat there till there was nothing to hear but her own harsh breathing, and when that too finally faded, she rose and went to an upstairs window and looked down at the empty driveway.
Whatever had happened was over. So why did she feel it had just begun?
iii (#ulink_2642bfb3-8c8d-510c-a73f-736d87642bda)
memories are made of this (#ulink_2642bfb3-8c8d-510c-a73f-736d87642bda)
‘And you kneed him in the balls?’ said Detective Superintendent Andy Dalziel gleefully. ‘Well done, lass.’
‘Sure. Except they must have been made of brass,’ said Ellie, who was sitting sideways on a sofa with a large pack of frozen oven chips draped over her knee and a smaller pack of fish fingers pressed against her wrist. Having a non-gourmet kid sometimes came in useful. ‘Have they got hold of Peter yet?’
This was aimed at Detective Sergeant Edgar Wield who’d just entered the room, carrying a mobile phone.
‘No, but they’re still there, they’ve located the coach. I’ve sent Seymour down there. He’ll spot them eventually, but Tegley Hall Theme Park’s a big place. And you said you didn’t want him paged over the speakers.’
‘No,’ said Ellie firmly. ‘Softly, softly. I don’t want him getting the kind of shock I had.’
The two detectives exchanged glances, then Dalziel said, ‘Talking of which, lass, as you won’t let us take you to the quackery, I’ve got Wieldy here to organize the quack to come to you. And afore you start sounding off again, I reckon you could do with a bit more than fish and chips for them joints of yours. Also, I don’t like your colour.’
‘And I bet you’ve arrested people for less than that. Sorry, Andy. That was stupid. I’m still feeling so angry. As for my colour, you should have seen me half an hour ago. I was grey. Not as grey as that bastard, though, after I’d kneed him.’
‘Aye, that’s where we’d got to, wasn’t it?’
‘Second time round!’
‘Aye, well. You were a bit excitable, first time.’
‘Hysterical, you mean?’
‘Nay, lass. You know me, if I’d meant hysterical, I’d have said it. Wieldy, you’re lurking. Summat else?’
‘Checked with the Education Department. No one there called Westcombe or fitting the descriptions.’
‘Christ, you’re checking up on me!’ exclaimed Ellie angrily. ‘You think maybe I just lose it when I’m confronted by stupid officials? Well, you could be about to find out you’re right.’
Wield went on as if she hadn’t spoken. ‘The car’s number. How sure are you you got it right?’
‘As sure as I could be considering it was going through my mind these two wanted to abduct me in order to do God knows what to me. So if I got a figure wrong, it wouldn’t be surprising, would it? But it was definitely a dark-blue BMW, one of the big ones. Look, why’re you wasting time grilling me like this? I scribbled everything I could remember down soon as I could. Christ, I haven’t been married to the Force all these years without picking up some of your nasty habits. Why aren’t you out there looking for these people?’
‘You’d be surprised how often I get asked that question and I’ve not worked out a smart answer yet,’ said Dalziel. ‘Can’t even say it’s raining. Why’re you asking about the car, Wieldy?’
‘Did a check, sir. And according to Swansea, what Ellie gave us isn’t a number in use.’
‘False plates then,’ said Dalziel. ‘But try the obvious variations just in case.’
‘Yes, sir. By the way, phone wire was shorted with a pin where it goes into the hall window. Pull it out, it should be OK, but we won’t touch it till Forensic’s finished out there. Oh, and Novello’s here.’
‘Ivor? Good. Send her in.’
‘Hang about,’ said Ellie. ‘If you’re thinking I need a friendly female copper to unburden my heart to…’
‘Nay. I brought her for the strip search but I’ll do it if you like,’ said Dalziel.
Wield made for the door.
Ellie said, ‘Wieldy, sorry I snapped at you. I think I may still be a bit… excitable.’
The sergeant’s generally inscrutable features which, in Dalziel’s words, were knobbly enough to make a pineapple look like a pippin, smoothed momentarily into a warm smile, and he said, ‘I’ll let you know soon as we get a hold of Pete.’
‘By God,’ said Dalziel after the sergeant had gone. ‘Was that a smile, or has he got toothache? Nearest yon bugger ever came to cracking his face at me was the time I fell into the swimming pool at the mayor’s reception. Oh aye. I see you remember that too.’
A smile had touched Ellie’s lips, and she forced it to broaden as she saw the Fat Man observing her closely. Anything was better than having a womanly weep in front of Andy Dalziel. And even more, in front of Detective Constable Shirley Novello, who had just slipped into the room. Five-four, sturdy frame, minimum make-up, dark-brown hair neat but nothing fancy, baggy sweatshirt and matching slacks, she should have been two steps from invisible, which was presumably her intention. Down-dressing did not deceive Ellie Pascoe’s expert eye, however. She’d heard her husband talk a little too appreciatively of the girl’s professional qualities, and she saw the way even Fat Andy’s spirits perked up a notch or two at her entry. This was definitely one to watch.
‘You going to make an old man happy, lass?’ said Dalziel.
‘Don’t think so, sir. Just a first take on house-to-house. We’ve got two people who noticed the BMW. Confirmation of colour, but nothing extra on the numberplate. One of them thought it had an unusually long aerial compared with her husband’s car, which is the same model.’
‘Well-heeled neighbours you’ve got, Ellie,’ said the Fat Man. ‘Mebbe we’re paying Pete too much. That it, Ivor?’
‘Except for an old lady lives at the corner, towards town, that is, says she looked out to see what all the fuss was when she heard the sirens and saw a car doing a three-point turn and going back the way it came. Metallic-blue, sounds like a Golf. Driver looked swarthy and sinister, she says.’
‘Watch a lot of telly, does she? Ivor, it’s what happened before we came that I’m interested in. Afterwards, any poor sod driving along and seeing the street full of flashing fuzz is going to find another route, specially if he’s had a swift snort or two at a business meeting.’
The notion was suggestive. Ellie looked longingly at the bottle of Scotch which the Fat Man had dug out as soon as he arrived. At the time it had seemed virtuously sensible to quote what her first aid course said about avoiding alcohol in cases of shock, but now it seemed merely priggish.
She said, ‘OK, Andy. Let’s do it one more time. Then I don’t care if it brings on complete amnesia, I’m going to have that drink you prescribed.’
‘I’m feeling better already,’ said Dalziel. ‘No, Ivor, don’t sneak off. Got your short stubby pencil ready? I want you taking notes. Everything, not just what you think’s important, OK?’
‘Sir,’ said Novello.
Her eyes met Ellie Pascoe’s and she gave a little smile. All she got in return was a small frown. Confirming what she’d felt on their previous few meetings, that La Pascoe didn’t much like her. Couldn’t blame her, the WDC thought complacently. When I’m her age, I’ve no intention of liking good-looking women ten years my junior who work with my husband. Not that her own husband, if she ever bothered, would be anything like Chief Inspector Pascoe. It would probably be a comfort to Ellie Pascoe to know that her fantasies featured chunky, hairy men on surf-pounded beaches, not slim, nice-mannered introverts who would feel it necessary to buy you a decent French meal before checking into a good four-star hotel. But it was not a comfort she was about to offer.
The Great God Dalziel was speaking.
‘Right, lass. One more time. You were really taken in at first?’
‘Damn right I was. All I could think was, not again, oh God, it’s not all happening again. You know, Rosie in hospital, me camping out there, all the fears…’
The memory of that time was still so powerful, it had the therapeutic effect of reducing her present aftershock to manageable size, and she went on more strongly, ‘She’d only gone back to school for this final week before the summer hols… she insisted, and you know Rosie, when she makes up her mind…’
‘Can’t think who she takes after,’ said Dalziel. ‘Wanted to see all her mates, did she? And not miss this end-of-term outing.’
‘Both of those. Also to get out from under me, I suspect.’
‘Eh?’
Ellie said, ‘Andy, I’m ready for that drink now. Please.’
She took the proffered tumbler and said scornfully, ‘That wouldn’t drown a tall gnat. Cheers.’
It went down in one. Dalziel, who’d poured himself a good three inches, poured her another millimetre.
‘God Almighty, man! And it’s not even your whisky,’ she said.
‘Not my stomach either,’ said Dalziel. ‘You said something about Rosie getting out from under you. Never had you down as the clinging-mother type.’
‘No? Perhaps not.’
She brooded on this for a moment, glanced at Novello, then, with an effort at matter-of-factness, went on, ‘Since we got her back, after the meningitis, I’ve hardly been able to bear letting her out of my sight. She goes in the garden to play and two minutes later I have a panic attack. I think in the end I just began to get on her nerves, so school seemed a desirable alternative.’
‘Nay, you know what kids are like about missing things…’
‘The trip to Tegley Hall, you mean? Well, there’s another thing. They invite any parents who feel like giving a hand to go along. It’s a big responsibility, ferrying that number of kids around somewhere like that. I was going to go, but last night Rosie suddenly said, “Why can’t Daddy go? Miss Martindale says it doesn’t just have to be mummies.” Peter, bless his heart, said, why not? He’d like nothing better than a day in the company of his daughter and a hundred other kids. And he rang you and you kindly said that considering how hard you’d been working him for the past hundred years or so, he was long overdue a bit of time off…’
‘Don’t recollect them as my exact words,’ said Dalziel.
‘Peter is one of nature’s paraphrasers. So, nothing for me to do but say, “Great. It’ll give me the chance to get on with some work,” and smile through my tears.’
‘So you worried?’
‘Of course I worried. I worried about what kind of mother I was. And I worried about them out there in the big wide world without me to look after them. And I worried about myself for worrying about them!’
Plus the other worries she wasn’t about to air in front of Novello. Or Dalziel either, for that matter. Or indeed herself if she could help it. Worries like damp patches on a kitchen wall, that you could stand a chair in front of, or hang a wallchart over, or even just ignore, but you knew that sometime you were going to have to deal with them.
‘So I went upstairs, switched my laptop on and started working,’ she concluded.
‘That help with worries, does it?’ He sipped his Scotch and looked at her doubtfully.
Something else she wasn’t going to lay out in present company.
‘The poet Cowper managed to keep religious mania at bay for several decades by dint of writing,’ she said spiritedly.
‘God moves in a mysterious way His wonders to perform,’ said Dalziel, whose capacity to surprise should have ceased to surprise her. ‘Then the doorbell rang?’
‘No. I heard their car and spoke to them out of the window. Then I went downstairs and opened the door.’
‘Oh aye, you said. No print on the bellpush then. Pity.’
‘I’m sorry. I should have thought on.’
He smiled at her sarcasm, then said seriously, ‘When they mentioned Rosie, it must have been right bad.’
‘Bad? It felt like the bottom had fallen out of the universe. It was like getting the worst news you could imagine, and knowing it was all your own fault.’
She spoke with a vehemence which came close to being excessive.
‘All your fault? Nay, luv, can’t see how you could ever think that,’ he said, viewing her closely.
If Dalziel had been by himself, she might have stumbled into an explanation.
Maybe something like, I felt so relieved that morning not to be going with Rosie, to know she was in Peter’s care, to have a day at last when I could stop worrying about her. But not just for her sake, and not even because I could probably do with the rest myself, but because when we nearly lost her, I knew then what I must have known before but never had occasion to look straight in the eye, that my single-handed sailing days were over forever, that I’d been pressed as part of a three-man crew on a lifelong voyage over what were hopefully oceans of absolute love. Except if it’s so absolute, how come there’s a little part of me somewhere which, like Achilles’s heel, didn’t get submerged? Forgive me muddling my metaphors, it’s probably this story I’m writing. But that’s another story. No, what I’m trying to say is, no matter how I try to hide it from myself, there’s something in me that sometimes yearns to be free, that gets nostalgic for the long-lost days of free choice, that comes close to seeing this love I feel not as a gift but as a burden, not as a privilege but a responsibility. Perhaps I’m simply a selfish person who knows now she can never be selfish again. Does anyone else feel like this? Am I a monster? That’s why I was so ready to believe them, that’s why I felt so guilty. It was like God had decided I hadn’t got the message loud and clear last time and I needed another dose of the same to get me straight.
Something like that, maybe. But probably not, even if Novello and her little notebook hadn’t been there.
‘Just a figure of speech, Andy,’ she said.
‘So you’d have gone with this pair?’ asked the Fat Man.
‘Anywhere they wanted. If they’d kept it vague I’d have got in that car and…and what, Andy? What did they want with me?’
‘That’s for them to know and us to find out,’ said Dalziel. ‘So what put you onto them?’
‘I’ve told you!’
‘Aye, but telling’s like peeing to a man with a swollen prostate, you think you’ve got it all out but there’s often a bit more to come.’
‘Who speaks so well should never speak in vain,’ said Ellie. ‘OK. At first I couldn’t think of anything except Rosie being ill again. Then when they said about trying to contact Peter and being told he wasn’t available, I nearly said, of course he wasn’t available because he’s on the coach!’
‘But you didn’t? Why not?’
‘I don’t know. I reckon to start with it was just a case of being too shocked to speak, and that gave me time to think, I suppose. And suddenly it was like fireworks going off in my brain. I found myself thinking, it’s not just Jehovah’s Witnesses that don’t drive thirty thousand pound BMWs. I mean, I know the council tax has gone up, but surely the Education Department doesn’t kit its employees out like this? Sorry. It makes sense to me, I assure you. At the same time I registered that two or three times they said he when they were talking about the head at Edengrove. Now, one thing anyone in our local Ed Department will know is that the head of Edengrove is Miss Martindale. Not to know her argues yourself braindead. So I thought I’d just give them a little test. I made up a Mr Johnson as head teacher. And when they didn’t respond to that, I knew something very funny was going on.’
‘So you decided to assault them?’
‘No. I thought of challenging them, but there were two of them and only one of me and if their purpose was as nefarious as I was beginning to imagine, I didn’t like the odds. Time to retreat and lock the door, I thought.’
‘So what brought out the beast in you?’ asked Dalziel.
‘It was the man. The woman was trying to play it cool, very reassuring, nothing to worry about. She could probably see that I was already sick to guts with worry. But he decided that the more worried I got, the less trouble I’d be, and he said something about getting a move on just in case it turned out to be more serious than they thought. God, that really got to me. I thought, you callous bastard! The woman tried to calm things down, but it was too late. I was so angry that I must have been the best advert for gun control you ever saw. Because if I’d had one, I would have shot him, no problem.’
‘Not then,’ said Dalziel. ‘Might have had one now, but. On the other hand, we’d have had a body to work on. Nowt like a body when you’re short of a lead.’
‘Are you saying you’d rather I’d killed one of them?’
He considered.
‘No,’ he said finally. ‘Gets boring interrogating corpses. Serious wound, but, now that would have been nice. Something that would need hospital treatment. How hard did you say you kneed him?’
‘I shouldn’t think he’ll be troubling his wife for a few nights, but I doubt if he’d go for treatment.’
‘Wife? You reckon he was married?’ said Dalziel casually.
‘Well, he wore a big gold ring on his wedding finger… Andy, that was clever. I’d forgotten that. I mean, I didn’t think I’d noticed that.’
‘Not all rubber-truncheon work down the nick. Anything else come to mind, apart from what you scribbled down?’
He looked at the piece of paper Ellie had scribbled her notes on.
‘Man was six feet,’ he read. ‘About thirty – slim build – light-brown hair – bushy – needed a cut – left-hand parting – brown eyes, I think – not blue – squarish face – open honest expression – God the bastards were good!…’
He looked enquiringly at Ellie.
‘Yeah, sorry about that.’
‘Nay, it’s useful what you felt. By good, you mean…?’
‘Saying they were with the Education Welfare Service. That’s the council department that helps deal with problems like absenteeism, truancy, bullying, parental complaint, anything that a school finds it can’t cope with internally. But what I mean is, at first they came over perfect for it. Nice, caring, positive people…’
‘Bumbling do-gooders, you mean? Sorry. Just trying to put it in terms my lads would understand. Clothing – suit – Prince of Wales check – light-blue shirt – blue and yellow diagonal striped tie – could have been Old Boys or a club – on his feet dark-brown sandals…’
‘Did I put that? No, he was wearing a sort of soft leather moccasin, no laces, dark-tan, casual but elegant, in fact, they looked rather expensive, come to think of it. Which is what you’ve made me do, you cunning sod. I never mentioned sandals!’
Dalziel grinned.
‘No. You put nowt. But shoes are important. Change everything else, but you want your feet to stay comfy.’
‘So if he changes into something else because he’s worried that I can describe him, he might keep the same shoes on?’
‘Aye, but don’t get excited. Not the kind of info we pass on to Interpol. Voice – light-baritone range – Irish accent…’
‘No, that one’s not going to work, Andy,’ said Ellie firmly. ‘I said no distinguishable accent, and that’s what I mean.’
‘So not a Yorkshireman.’
‘Not like you, no.’
‘Not deep and musical then. But there’s all sorts of Yorkshire voices. There’s that high squeaky one, like yon journalist fellow who used to shovel shit for Maggie Thatcher. And there’s that one like a circular saw –’
‘No, not northern at all,’ interrupted Ellie.
‘So, not northern and not Irish. We’re getting somewhere. Scottish? Welsh? Cockney? The Queen? Michael Caine? Maurice Chevalier?’
‘You’re getting silly. No, he didn’t have any accent at all, really. Like an announcer on Radio Four.’
‘You think Radio Four announcers don’t have accents?’ said Dalziel. ‘No, hang about, I think I’m with you. It’s you you think doesn’t have an accent! What you mean is this guy spoke the same way you do? Middle-class posh, but not so much it gets up your nose.’
Ellie, faced as so often with a choice between laughing at Andy Dalziel or thumping him, decided she’d been involved in enough violence for the day and laughed.
‘Yes, I suppose that is what I do mean,’ she said.
‘Grand. Now the woman. How’s she for injury, by the way?’
‘She might have a black eye, and a few scratches,’ said Ellie, thinking affectionately of the Pompon de Paris. ‘Hey, and there could be a few threads from her dress hooked on the rose bush by the front door.’
‘We’ll check. So. Age thirties – five-eight or -nine – dark eyes – long face – not bad-looking – expensive make-up –what’s the difference between expensive and not so expensive?’
‘The more you pay, the less you see.’
‘Like sending your kids to public school. Hair black – natural – short – classy stylist – I won’t ask – build slim – good figure – there’s that good again. Know what I mean by good, but what’s it signify to you?’
Ellie threw an exasperated glance at Shirley Novello who returned it blankly.
‘Well, I’m sure that to you, Andy, a good figure suggests something like two footballs in a gunny bag, but what I mean is something you can see’s there but all in proportion, back, front, and middle, OK?’
‘Like you, you mean?’ said Dalziel, looking at her appreciatively. ‘In fact, sounds a lot like you, except mebbe for the expensive make-up. Joke. Now, clothing – olive-green cotton dress – sleeveless – leather shoulder bag – no stockings – pale-green sling-back shoes. Was she married?’
Ellie thought then said, ‘Yes, she was wearing a wedding ring. And she had a ring on her right-hand middle finger too. Green stone. Plus a wristwatch. Expanding bracelet, gold, I think. Sorry, I should have put that down.’
‘You’re doing fine. The watch on the same hand as the ring?’
‘Yes. The right. Hey, that means…’
‘She could be left-handed. That’s summat. Voice husky – accent Midlandish. Birmingham? Wolverhampton? Black Country?’
‘Any. It was just a patina, so to speak, not a full-blown accent.’
‘Might have made it to Radio Four, eh? Hello, here comes Smiler again.’
Wield had re-entered the room.
He said, ‘We’ve got Peter,’ and handed Ellie the mobile phone, then looked at Dalziel and jerked his head doorwards, suggesting they leave.
The Fat Man yawned, scratched his nose and poured himself another Scotch.
‘Peter! Yes, yes, I’m fine, really… And you two… that’s great, I knew you would be, but I just wanted to hear it from your own lips… Wieldy’s told you all about it, I’m sure… honestly, no harm done… Well, you’ll guess I was a bit shook up at first, but once I realized it was just a stupid jape… what else could it be?… No, no, don’t do that. I don’t want Rosie worried. Just carry on, enjoy the rest of the day… I’m fine, really… no, I won’t be on my own, and you’re not due back late… give my love to Rose… and you too… yes, I will, I do… yes, he’s here. ’Bye, darling.’
She handed the phone to Dalziel, then bowed her head and let out a deep breath as she relaxed from the effort of keeping her feelings in check. The temptation to let it all flood out as soon as she heard Peter’s voice had been very strong, which was probably why the fat bastard had stayed in the room. She looked up to find Wield watching her, and jerked her head at him in a mirror image of his own gesture, then led him outside.
‘Well, that’s a relief,’ she said in the hall.
Novello had followed them out. Dalziel must have dismissed her. All right for her to hear me spilling my guts, but not to eavesdrop on his conversation with Peter, thought Ellie.
‘You’re looking a lot better,’ said Wield.
‘Yes? Well, I suppose a lot of that’s down to Andy, though I hate to say it. He’s…’
‘Good?’ offered Wield.
‘Let’s not go overboard. He’s subtler than I imagined. In a very unsubtle way, of course. So what happens now, Wieldy? You all go away and start to wonder if maybe it wasn’t just an over-reaction by a hysterical woman after all?’
‘No. We go away and don’t rest till we find out what’s been going on here.’
‘Any ideas in the pipeline?’
She saw Novello’s brow crinkle as if she might have something to say, but before she could speak, if that were her intention, Wield said very firmly, ‘No.’
Ellie looked into that violently contoured face in which nothing was readable except the affection in his eyes and wondered if the No was a lie or the truth.
And which of them would she find more comfort in?
iv
spelt from Sibyl’s leaves (#ulink_a47fc7d3-e3fb-57c7-92e4-48ff878d854a)
Edgar Wield…
Edgar Wield…
biking through the glen…
Poof.
Perve.
Shirtlifter.
Arse bandit.
All these and more figured in Gaw Sempernel’s brief remarks when he dropped by in person to tell me to add Sergeant Wield to his current operational folder which, with what he probably sees as subtle wit, he has christened Sibyl’s Leaves.
It’s not often Gaw and I meet face to face these days.
Well, not face to face exactly, he towering, I at wheelchair level, his eyes never meeting mine direct, mine looking straight at his immaculately tailored crotch.
If I reached out and touched him, how would he react?
Not, I suspect, as once I could make him react just by smiling and moistening my lips at him across a crowded committee room.
‘Reasons for inclusion?’ I asked him.
Because I say so, hovered in the air between us.
Then the famous Sempernel diplomacy clicked in and he said, ‘Close associate of Dalziel and Pascoe, very friendly with Eleanor Pascoe, lives with Edwin Digweed, former solicitor, struck off shortly after qualifying when he was convicted of committing an act of gross indecency with a gentleman whose voice is now listened to with great attention when he speaks from, appropriately enough, the cross-benches in the Upper Chamber. It was theorized at the time by our masters that, had not the case become public, it might have been a prelude to long-term political blackmail.’
‘Grounds?’ I asked, fingers poised.
‘Irrelevant now,’ he said dismissively. ‘Point is, here we have a policeman whose private life makes him vulnerable. The only way he’s been able to survive is with the protection of his superiors, and we would be wise, I’m sure you’ll agree, to ask ourselves why that has been given.’
‘You’re not suggesting that Superintendent Dalziel and DCI Pascoe are gay?’ I exclaimed.
‘If they were, that would make things simple,’ he said pompously. ‘It is the fact that they probably are not that I find sinister.’
You find friendship sinister, I thought. Oh, Gaw!
‘In any case, the sergeant’s sexual orientation is no longer a matter of law,’ I said.
‘Sexual orientation?’ he mocked. ‘You have been too long immersed in the obliquities of Sibylline utterance. Let us call a spade a spade.’
And then came out the long list of mocking insults.
Oh Gaw, I thought. What indignities did you suffer at that school of yours to make you so vehement? Or perhaps the question should be, what ecstasies did you experience which make you feel so guilty?
But nothing I said.
Mine is not to reason why, or at least not to be seen reasoning why.
Mine is merely to obey orders and collect here all those whom Gaw Sempernel sees fit to designate as leaves on his tree.
Edgar Wield…
Edgar Wield…
Most inscrutable of men…
Working-class background. Can’t have been easy growing up feeling as you did in a Yorkshire mining village, son of a lurcher-loving, pigeon-fancying father, with the pit gaping at your feet and the only traditional ways out university for the very bright or professional Rugby League for the very brawny.
You were neither, Edgar, but you found a third way which, though it attracted the contumely of your peers, diverted their suspicion from the truth of you.
The police.
Were you perhaps still trying to convince yourself that it was, as they used to say, only a phase? That given the right environment you’d wake up one day and say to yourself, what I really fancy is finding a willing lass and giving her a right good shagging?
Or were you looking for a job where most people see only the uniform, never the man?
You were good at the job.
Not ivory tower university bright perhaps, but sharply focused with a phenomenal memory and a huge capacity for marshalling intricate detail, you took all the police exams in your stride, you won commendations for bravery, your annual reviews were undiluted paeans, you looked set to rise high. But once you became sergeant in the CID, you remained fixed.
Not for you the exposure of high rank.
You enjoy what you are doing. You are good at it. And your association with those other two who have also come fluttering down into Sempernel’s leaves, Dalziel and Pascoe, has given you confidence enough to live your life more freely, not to flaunt who you are but not to hide it either.
And still Gaw Sempernel suspects you.
Or at least feels he might at some point be able to use you.
From what I know of you, lying here in my little casket, Sergeant, this may not be the least of his errors.
loved by his friends…
refusing to yield…
Edgar Wield…
Edgar Wield…
v (#ulink_5bbaec00-bbcb-5596-b2c6-a6950a936b58)
revenge and retribution (#ulink_5bbaec00-bbcb-5596-b2c6-a6950a936b58)
Every age has its own defining philosophical speculations, often best expressed in terms which may at a glance appear over-personalized and tainted with self-interest.
It was, for example, in relation to her prospects of professional advancement that Shirley Novello first asked herself the question, was being treated like a man a form of sexual discrimination?
Things had seemed pretty straightforward the first time she had attended a CID gathering in the Black Bull with the Holy Trinity and found she was expected to go to the bar and collect the drinks no matter who was actually buying the round. She was disappointed without being surprised, as this chimed perfectly with the expectation at all levels in the Force that if tea or coffee were to be fetched, any woman present would be the fetcher. Novello had worked out various non-confrontational strategems to avoid doing this, but she had not been afraid to fall back on confrontation.
Confrontation with Andy Dalziel, however, felt as futile as confrontation with Uranus. (Or any planet, but Uranus somehow seemed most fitting.) Hit it hard as you could, you weren’t going to jolt it out of its orbit.
The other two, however, gave the impression that they might in their better moments be susceptible to the nudge of right reason.
But before she could nerve herself to put this to the test, she had discovered by distant observation that if the group consisted of the Trinity alone, it was usually Wield who did the fetching and carrying, while if the three became a pair, it was Pascoe.
So now right reason asked, if a male sergeant and a male chief inspector could accept this as the natural order of things, was it reasonable for a female constable to cry discrimination?
Or, to put it another way, what should a woman do who fought for equal treatment and then found that the equal treatment she fought for was in fact unequal?
These were the speculations thronging her mind as she returned from the bar at eleven o’clock on the morning after the attempted kidnapping of Ellie Pascoe, bearing a tray loaded with a pint of best, a half of the same, a fizzy mineral water and a Coke.
Pascoe’s request for the mineral water had emboldened her to buy the Coke.
They were in the Black Bull to discuss possible ramifications of yesterday’s events. The chief inspector had arrived late at the station, having spent the morning ensuring that his house and Edengrove School were being watched over to his satisfaction. He looked worn out, and it was this wanness which the Fat Man had used as an excuse to retire instantly to the pub where, he averred, he had his best thoughts, and they would be free from interruption. Novello’s inclusion had had all the appearance of a throwaway afterthought, coming as Dalziel led the trio out of the CID room. But Novello had long since concluded that most of the Fat Man’s apparent afterthoughts were carefully planned. The wise thing was to be neither flattered by his attention nor offended by the lack of it.
She placed the tray on the table, noting with some satisfaction that she’d managed to slop a little beer over Dalziel’s change (the seriousness of the occasion was marked by the fact that Dalziel had actually bought a round), and then put all personal and philosophical considerations out of her mind to focus on the debate in progress.
The on-the-table theory was that the attempted abduction had something to do with Pascoe’s work.
‘Wieldy, you were trawling that mind of thine for folk Pete’s put away who were nutty enough to take it personally.’
Dalziel’s natural Luddism was expressed in his boast, ‘Who needs great ugly lumps of hi-tech equipment cluttering the place when we’ve got Wieldy who’s twice as efficient and three times as ugly?’ but Novello had noticed that the sergeant’s computer skills were state of the art.
Whatever its source, the list of perps who’d gone down threatening the DCI with personal injury was impressively long. For a nice quiet guy, Pascoe seemed to have got up a lot of criminal noses.
But Wield’s conclusion was that in most cases the threats had just been empty, if over-heated, air.
‘You need a special kind of twist to nurse a grievance and plan revenge,’ said Wield.
‘Is that right, Sigmund?’ said Dalziel. ‘So what you’re saying is, you’ve dug deep and ended up with nowt but an empty hole?’
‘No,’ said Wield. ‘In fact, I struck a root. Franny Roote.’
Dalziel looked blank for a moment, then let his jaw drop in the mock-amazement he had taken to affecting if Wield essayed a joke.
‘You mean that weird student at yon college? My memory serves me right, we couldn’t do him for owt but being an accessory.’
‘That’s right,’ said Wield. ‘But after listening to what had gone on there, the judge ordered a psycho-evaluation before sentencing. And after getting an earful of that, he decided best place for Roote was a secure hospital. To start with the lad refused all treatment, and during this period he seems to have fixed on the DCI, or sergeant as he was then, as the man responsible for putting him there. He seemed to think you had something personal against him.’
‘I know it’s silly, but I do tend to feel strongly about people who try to kill me,’ said Pascoe. ‘I recall I got a weird letter from him while he was waiting trial. I passed it on to the court, so in a way he was right about me helping to get him certified. But there’s been nothing since. I haven’t thought about him for years.’
‘Doesn’t mean he’s not been thinking about you,’ said Dalziel. ‘Wieldy, I take it there’s summat else.’
‘Only that he finally accepted the treatment and settled down to being a model patient-cum-prisoner. Did an OU degree in English Literature, and went on to start a research course for a Ph.D. or some such thing. Finally he convinced them he wasn’t a menace to society any more and got himself discharged. Last month.’
There was a moment’s silence, then the Fat Man said, ‘That it?’
‘Except…’
‘What?’
‘He’d know Ellie, she was teaching at the college then, wasn’t she? When you met her.’
Pascoe nodded.
‘So?’ said Dalziel.
‘Nothing. Just a connection,’ said Wield. ‘Also, probably means nowt, but this research he’s doing. His topic is, I made a note of it, aye, here it is… Revenge and Retribution in English Drama.’
Another silence, then Dalziel said, ‘Beats sewing mailbags and breaking rocks, I suppose. Got an address?’
‘Aye. Sheffield.’
‘Not so far, then. Set up liaison with South Yorkshire, then pop down there in the morning and check him out.’
‘Can’t do it tomorrow, sir. Day off.’
‘Oh aye? And what are you doing that’s more important than finding out who’s threatening your colleague’s family, Sergeant?’ demanded Dalziel in that tone of high moral dudgeon he saved for underlings who dared suggest they had a private life.
Wield glanced at Pascoe, who said, ‘Actually, Wieldy is very kindly entertaining that same colleague’s family. He’s invited Ellie and Rosie out to Enscombe to look round the Children’s Zoo at the Hall.’
‘Oh,’ said Dalziel, slightly flummoxed. ‘Right. That’s fine. Only don’t try putting it down as overtime. Best go to check Roote out yourself then, Pete. If you feel up to it.’
‘It’ll be a pleasure,’ said Pascoe. ‘I’m in court with Kelly Cornelius at twelve, but that should give me plenty of time.’
Shirley Novello listened and learned. These three had a pretty cosy relationship, she thought. Though perhaps cosy was not a word that fitted well on anything to do with Andy Dalziel. But they meshed easily together, like well-oiled cog wheels. It was a piece of machinery she’d like to get herself linked up with, but she recognized the dangers in trying to poke yourself too brutally among moving cogs.
She’d noted with interest the reference to Ellie Pascoe’s job way back in the dark ages when they’d met. A college lecturer. Queen of the kids in never-never land. That figured.
‘Right,’ said Dalziel. ‘That’s revenge took care of. Let’s move on. Cases in progress where your involvement in the prosecution could make it seem worthwhile to some no-brain wanker to get you by the goolies. How’s that look?’
Pascoe winced at the language, then sent an irritatingly apologetic glance to Novello, who winced, less obviously, in her turn. Hadn’t marriage to the Nutcracker Fairy taught him anything?
Wield shrugged and said, ‘Nothing obvious. Any road, I’d have thought they saved threats for civilians. Cops they’d offer a bung.’
‘Yeah, you and me, mebbe, Wieldy. But every sod knows fancy pants here’s incorruptible. So, tell us, Mother Teresa, is there owt you’re working on that gives you that funny feeling you’re famous for?’
Pascoe, with more than his customary diffidence, said, ‘Well, it is just a feeling, but for some reason I keep on thinking Kelly Cornelius.’
‘Her!’ cried Dalziel in derision. ‘She’s a lass, not to mention a sodding accountant. You’ve got more chance of getting aggro from a Siamese waitress.’
Putting aside this touchstone of timidity for future deconstruction, Pascoe said, ‘She is actually being charged with assault on a police officer, don’t forget.’
‘Oh aye, but that were Hector, and usually they give you a medal for thumping him,’ said Dalziel. ‘Any road, why should she want to frighten you off? You’re just keeping her on ice on this assault charge while the Fraud boys get their act together, isn’t that the arrangement? They’re the ones who are going to send her down for ten years when they finally get their fingers out. What’s going off there, anyway, Pete? I don’t mind helping out, but won’t tomorrow be the third time you’ve had to go along and ask for a further remand in custody? And what’s Desperate Dan know that we don’t?’
Desperate Dan was Dan Trimble, Mid-Yorkshire’s Chief Constable, who in Dalziel’s eyes didn’t need to know anything other than how to pour single malt without missing the glass whenever the Head of CID graced him with his presence.
‘If I knew that, then he wouldn’t,’ said Pascoe. ‘OK, I’m just concerned with the assault charge, but that’s what’s keeping her remanded in custody. Two possibilities. One, some accomplice wants her loose so that she can do a runner. Someone at the bank, maybe, who’s afraid if this goes on much longer, she’s going to start pointing the finger.’
‘Someone like who?’
‘Well, I gather Fraud are looking very closely at her immediate boss, George Ollershaw. They’ve got nothing definite yet, but you can tell they’re sniffing the air.’
‘Ollershaw? Him? Nay, he’s a right banker, and like most on ’em can probably play a fair tune on the fiddle, but I can’t see him getting mixed up with owt violent.’
‘Know him, do you, sir?’
‘I’ve seen him down the Gents. And heard him too, sounding off to his mates. Big I Am, but a long way off Mr Big, I’d say.’
The Gents, as Novello had learned after an embarrassing misunderstanding, wasn’t a lavatorial reference but a popular shortening of the Borough Club for Professional Gentlemen, the Athenaeum of the North, an exclusive social and dining club, men only, of course, which made Novello think that perhaps her misunderstanding wasn’t. When she’d wondered to Wield why someone as anarchically unclubbable as Dalziel should have joined such an organization, the sergeant had replied, ‘Cos they didn’t want him, of course.’
‘All the same, I think they’ve still got him in the frame,’ said Pascoe. ‘But there’s another possibility. One way of looking at it, the prime target for intimidation is Kelly herself. Until the Fraud Squad get a line on the Nortrust Bank money, it’s floating around somewhere in cyberspace, and she may be the only one who can get at it. So maybe someone wants her out so they can use methods that even Fraud draw the line at to get her to tell where it is.’
It seemed to Novello that the DCI was putting forward his Cornelius hypotheses with more stubbornness than conviction.
Dalziel clearly thought so too. He said, ‘Doesn’t make sense. Anyone serious could easily get to her in the remand centre, bend her over a table and threaten to shove a broken bottle up her jacksie, happens all the time.’
‘That’s fine if what you want to find out is where the swag’s buried, but it’s not like that here,’ insisted Pascoe. ‘OK, it’s easy enough to get some prison hardcase to do the job for a couple of rocks, but what’s Kelly going to tell her? Nothing that makes any sense, I’d bet. No, it could be the only way to get at this loot is to sit Kelly down in front of a state-of-the-art computer and make her an offer she can’t refuse. To do that, you want her out of custody. All they’d need from me is to make our opposition to her reapplication for bail tomorrow a bit feeble.’
Dalziel snorted doubt and provoked Wield into a display of loyalty.
‘Makes sense to me,’ he said. ‘Twisting Pete’s arm to perjure himself is one thing. Bloody hard to do, and harder to get away with ’cos everyone in the job would sit up and take notice if suddenly his evidence changed. But subtly getting up some magistrate’s nose so as he grants bail just to show who’s in charge of the courts here, that would be dead easy. And not such a strain on the conscience either.’
‘Oh aye? You’d do it, would you, if that antique bookie of thine were threatened?’ said Dalziel.
Antiquarian book dealer, corrected Novello mentally, watching with the keenness of an ambitious student to see how Wield would react to this reference to his partner.
‘Straight choice between Edwin and a crook, no problem,’ said Wield without hesitation, looking the Fat Man right in the eye.
‘Well, bugger me,’ said Dalziel. ‘Thank God there’s thee and me left with some moral fibre, Ivor, and I’m not so sure about thee. You’re keeping very quiet for a lass. Didn’t your trip to the wishing well get you any ideas?’
‘Wishing well?’ echoed Novello uncertainly.
‘Aye, I take it that’s where tha tossed my change,’ said Dalziel, poking at the wet coins with his forefinger. ‘Only, when I were young, you had to leave it there to get any results.’
‘I can take it back and get some more drink if you like, sir,’ said Novello sweetly.
‘Nay, it’s some other bugger’s shout,’ said Dalziel, closing his fingers round the money, shaking it dry, and thrusting it into his pocket. ‘And while we’re waiting for Mr and Mrs Alzheimer here to remember the way to their wallets, why don’t you give us the benefit of female intuition, Ivor? Or are you only here for the beer?’
You tell me, fatso! thought Novello. But even as she fought the impulse to tip the remnants of her Coke over his great grizzled head, the answer came to her in that curious admixture of gratification and indignation which was her frequent response to Dalziel.
She was here not because he fancied her or wanted someone to fetch the beer; she was here because he simply reckoned she could make a useful contribution.
She looked around. Like Mrs Robinson, all she could see were sympathetic eyes. Well, four anyway. The Fat Man’s expression was one of confident expectation, like a ringmaster watching a performing pig. Bastard.
She said, ‘Well, there was one thing that did occur to me about what happened yesterday…’
‘Spit it out, lass, afore I die of thirst.’
‘What if you, that is we, are all barking up the wrong tree? What if it’s got nothing whatsoever to do with the DCI and the people he’s put away or is trying to put away? What if in fact it’s all to do with Ellie, Mrs Pascoe, herself?’
Silence fell and the three men looked at each other with a wild surmise, though Novello feared it had more to do with her sanity than her insight.
Then the phone behind the bar rang and Jack Mahoney, the landlord, after listening a moment, called, ‘Are you buggers here?’
Dalziel said, ‘How many times do you need telling to put your mitt over the mouthpiece first, you thick sod? Ivor.’
For once Novello felt nothing but relief at being appointed gofer.
She went to the phone, identified herself, and listened.
Then she looked towards the waiting men.
‘Well?’ said Dalziel. ‘Have I won the lottery, or wha’?’
But it was to Pascoe that Novello addressed herself, trying and failing to sound neutrally official.
‘Sir,’ she said. ‘It’s Seymour. It’s lousy reception, but there’s been more trouble at your house. I’m sorry, but I think he said he’s following an ambulance to the hospital.’
vi
citizen’s arrest
Ellie Pascoe hadn’t realized just how shaken up she still was until the doorbell startled her so much she knocked a fortunately almost empty cup of coffee over her computer.
Get back to normal, she’d told herself, and then recalled that this was also what she’d told herself after Rosie’s illness and had soon come to an understanding that normal wasn’t just a sequence of repeated activities, but a condition like virginity which could never be regained.
But she’d followed the pattern of her normal day, retreating (a nice religious word for what sometimes felt like a nice religious activity) to the boxroom which she refused to call a study. Real writers had studies and you weren’t a real writer till you got something published. Well, she had hopes. The rejection of her third attempt at a novel might have driven her to despair had it not come at the time of Rosie’s illness when despair wasn’t a place she had any desire to visit, and certainly not for the sake of anything as unimportant as a sodding book!
As Rosie started to recover, Ellie had started to write again, but just as her daughter seemed in her play to have turned away from the games of imagination which had once been her favourite territory, so the mother now found herself toying with characters and situations from long ago rather than the snapshot here-and-now realism she’d hitherto thought of as her forte.
She’d pursued this new line without questioning, even after she realized that it wasn’t likely to lead to anything she could submit for publication. But it was… fun? Yes, it was certainly that. But, like the fun of children, like child’s play, it was learning also. Here was something important to her at that time in those circumstances, but also in other times and future circumstance maybe. During her previous existence as a lecturer, a colleague who ran a Creative Writing course had moaned to her that he spent far too much time dealing with the hang-ups of students who clearly regarded narrative fiction as a branch of therapy rather than a branch of art. Now she knew what he meant. Therapy you kept to yourself. Art took you, trembling, in front of the footlights.
She brought this perspective to bear on her rejected third novel. Suddenly she found herself asking paragraph by paragraph the two essential questions. Is this really so important to me I’ve got tosay it? Is this potentially so interesting to readers, they’ll have to read it?
And for a whole week without saying anything to Peter or anyone else, she had launched a savage attack upon her holy script, like Moses going at the tablets with a sledgehammer. The result had been… she had no idea what the result had been, except that before, the book had read clever and now it felt like it read true. A deep distress has humanized my soul…? Well, maybe. Three days ago she’d sent it off to the publisher who’d rejected its previous manifestation. Her accompanying note said, Last time you said it showed promise but… So tell me what it shows now. Only this time I’d appreciate it if you told me quick!
And then she’d returned to the therapy of her tale of old, parodic, far-off things and battles long ago. Self-indulgence is the novelist’s greatest sin, but here she could indulge herself to her heart’s, and her head’s, content. Here she could mock, mimic, talk dirty, wax sentimental, be anarchic, anachronistic, anything she wanted. Here she had power without responsibility, for she was writing solely for herself. No one else was going to read this. She ruled alone in this world, its normalities were whatever she made them. Or, to put it rather less grandiloquently, this was her comfort blanket she could pick up and chew whenever her fragile sensibilities felt the need. So that’s what she called it in her computer. Comfort Blanket. It was still unfinished but so what? The real pleasure was being able to go back over it again and again, changing things, trying new things out.
Nice if life were like that, she thought as she switched on her laptop. Call it up, click on Edit, and cut, copy, find, replace, delete…
Her words suddenly came from nowhere to fill the screen. She smiled. To her essentially non-technological mind, it was still magic.
Now where had she got up to in her revision? Oh yes. There it was.
Chapter 2
As they came down from the headland, the storm died, not a belly-wound death, but quick as an arrow through the heart. One moment the wind off the sea threatened to whirl them along with the racing tatters of low grey cloud, the next the air was still and balmy and the full moon, riding in a star-studded sky, lit the camp site below like a thousand lanterns.
Hadn’t she used that simile before? So what? Homer used his stock images over and over. Get obsessed with novelty and you ended up with a wardrobe full of lovely clothes you could never wear again.
Here, those so tired that they’d slept despite the howling wind were now aroused by the sudden silence. Men began to busy themselves drying offthe weapons and armour which had got soaked in the storm, while the women started building up the tiny fires which were all they’d dared kindle in face of the gale. But all activity stopped as they became aware of the approaching procession.
The Greek came first, his hands bound behind his back and the guard commander’s sword resting lightly against his neck. For all that, he managed to look like a returning traveller greeting old friends, head held high, teeth showing bright through the tangle of beard as he smiled this way and that, nose wrinkling appreciatively at the smell of cooking already arising from one or two fires.
But his eyes were never still, drinking in every detail of the camp.
Bringing up the rear was the wounded guard. He gripped his bleeding left wrist tightly with his right hand and his face showed white as moonlight beneath the weather-beaten skin.
‘What’s up, mate?’ called someone.
‘Bloody Greek spy. Nearly took my fucking hand off. Bastard!’
‘That right? Don’t worry, we’ll chop more than his hand off before we’re finished.’
The guard commander said mildly, ‘Glad to see you’re so keen for action, soldier. You can take over up the headland. Go on, don’t hang about. Could be there’s a whole army of Greeks landing there already.’
The word Greeks buzzed quickly through the camp, and soon the way ahead was blocked bya crowd of men, many with their weapons out. Unperturbed, the prisoner advanced at the same steady pace, forcing them to retreat before him, till someone at the rear set up a cry of, ‘The Prince! The Prince!’ and the men moved to either side, leaving a path clear.
Two men had emerged from the sole substantial shelter in the camp, a small pavilion erected in the lee of a huge boulder which had shielded it from the worst of the storm. One was grey-bearded and bent with the weight of years, the other young, slim, upright, with still, watchful eyes set in a narrow clean-shaven face.
Suddenly the fat man sank to his knees and prostrated himself with his face pressed against the young man’s sandals.
‘Have mercy, great Prince,’ his muffled voice pleaded. ‘Like the gods you are clearly descended from, take pity on this poor miserable wretch whose only hope for life and succour lies in your infinite generosity.’
The young man didn’t look impressed.
‘What’s this you’ve brought us, Achates?’ he asked.
Succinctly the guard commander told his story.
‘So, a Greek, you say? And probably a spy?’
A cry of protest rose from the recumbent man, cut off sharply as Achates pressed the point of his sword into his neck.
‘Could be. Shall I set him on a griddle over a slow fire for half an hour till he’s ready to tell us?’
A murmur of approval went up from the listening men, but the Prince said gravely, ‘This is not how our religion has taught us to treat the wayworn traveller who comes as a guest in our midst. Let food and dry clothing be brought, and when he is refreshed, I shall talk to him to discover what manner of man he is and his purpose in coming here.’
The fat man began to gabble fulsome thanks, but the Prince silenced him with a sharp movement of his foot and went on, ‘Nevertheless, heat up the griddle in case I am not satisfied.’
The Prince disengaged his foot and Achates prodded the Greek upright with his sword. Two young women came forward, one with some clothing, the other with a bronze platter piled high with steaming food.
‘That smells grand. I’m right grateful, lord. Only I need a hand to eat with.’
‘Only one?’ said Achates, raising his weapon. ‘Which would you like to keep?’
‘Nay, not so hasty,’ said the Greek, starting back. ‘Hang about.’
He flexed his broad shoulders, took a deep breath, bowed forward, his body hunched, and with a single convulsive movement, he snapped the length of cloth which bound his wrists.
At this moment the doorbell rang and Ellie, dragged back from the dangerous world of her imagination to the equally dangerous world of her life, knocked over the cup.
‘Fuck!’ she said, jumping up and shaking the coffee from the keyboard.
Amazingly, when she finished, the screen still displayed her story but for safety’s sake she saved and switched off.
The doorbell was ringing again.
Even the knowledge that Detective Constable Dennis Seymour was sitting in his car right opposite the house didn’t prevent her from checking on the bellringer from behind the curtains like any suburban housewife in a sitcom.
It was her friend, Daphne Aldermann, full of eager curiosity after having been intercepted and checked out by the watching policeman. After a short hiatus to pour herself and her guest a nerve-soothing Scotch – once you got on Dr Dalziel’s books, you followed his prescriptions to the bitter end – she had launched into the narrative with mock-heroic gusto, and thence to the calmer pleasures of self-analysis. As a long-time opponent of all forms of violent action, she felt it necessary to explain in detail to Daphne, who had no objection whatsoever to a bit of violence in a good cause, what had provoked her to physical assault.
‘It was using Rosie that did it,’ she said. ‘It was my own guilt feelings that really exploded, I suppose.’
‘Your guilt feelings?’
Daphne wasn’t Dalziel and she certainly wasn’t that nebby infant, Novello.
She gave her a version of the confession she’d rehearsed when talking to the Fat Man, ending with, ‘So you see what a mixed-up cow I’ve turned into. I feel like that base Indian – in Hamlet, is it? –who threw away the pearl richer than all his tribe. Only I got it back.’
‘Othello, I think. And the point was he had no idea that what he’d got had any value at all. And you didn’t throw Rosie away anyway,’ said Daphne Aldermann sensibly. ‘And you’ve always been a mixed-up cow, so no change there.’
It was, she felt, in her relationship with Ellie Pascoe, her avocation to be sensible. In upbringing, outlook and circumstance, the two women were light years apart. But the mad scientist of chance had chosen to set their opposing particles on a collision course some years earlier, and while a great deal of energy had been released, it had been through fusion rather than fission.
Ellie looked ready to meet her head-on in battle, but in the end diverted to a minor skirmish.
‘You sure it’s Othello?’ she said truculently. ‘I thought the nearest you privately educated lot got to literature was carrying the Collected Works on your head during deportment lessons.’
‘You’re forgetting. They made us learn a classic each morning between the cross-country run and the first cold shower,’ said Daphne. ‘So OK, something bad happens to our kids, we feel responsible. Mothers are programmed that way. Or conditioned – let’s not get into that argument.’
‘I know that. But knowing doesn’t stop you feeling. And being shocked how much you feel. Why ever I did it, I still can’t believe I actually assaulted those people.’
‘Oh, come on,’ said Daphne, with all the ease of a natural supporter of corporal and capital punishment. ‘They had it coming. God knows what they were going to do with you, but if they get caught, probably they’ll get off with writing a hundred lines and probation. At least as he smiles at you out of the dock, you’ll be able to think, I left my mark on you, mate!’
Ellie laughed and refilled their glasses. It had been one of the mad scientist’s better ideas to have Daphne call round that morning. As soon as she saw her, Ellie realized that of all her friends, here was the one best suited to the circumstances. With Daphne she could get serious without getting heavy, and her different world view provided a stimulating, if sometimes infuriating, change of perspective.
They drank and Daphne said, ‘So, how’s Rosie? Did she get a whiff of all the excitement?’
‘We tried to keep it from her, but you never know what they pick up, do you? I was tempted to keep her off school today, but that would have confirmed there was something going on. Anyway, the holidays start tomorrow, and she made such a fuss about getting back after her illness, she’d have been brokenhearted to miss the fun of the last day.’
‘Children’s hearts are made of one of the least frangible materials known to man,’ said Daphne with a mother-of-two’s certainty. ‘Especially girls’. I seem to recall breaking mine on an almost daily basis but somehow surviving without resort to Dr Christian Barnard. You too, I bet.’
‘Perhaps. I never lost my best friend when I was Rosie’s age, but,’ said Ellie.
There’d been two girls stricken by the meningitis bug. The other, Rosie’s classmate and best friend, Zandra, had died.
Daphne grimaced and said, ‘I was forgetting that. Sorry. It’s funny, a child’s grief, unless you’ve experienced it yourself, you don’t think about it much… but she was keen to get back to Edengrove, you say? I’d have thought…’
‘Me too. We’ve talked about Zandra, naturally. Or rather I’ve talked. Rosie listens. But she doesn’t say much beyond, the nix got her. You remember the nix? The water-imp in that book she used to be crazy about, whose hobby was abducting young girls? The educational psych, who looks about fifteen and has a stutter, says I shouldn’t worry, in fact I should be pleased Rosie’s found a formula which enables her to deal with her loss. Like she’s bottling it up, you mean? I said. Like she’s dealing with it, says this adolescent expert firmly. She’ll talk when she wants to talk, just leave the channels open. Just try to let things settle back to what they were before. Routines are more than comfortable, they are essential. Christ, I reckon she must have majored on The Little Book of Psycho-pap or some such thing!’
‘You didn’t actually say that, did you?’
Ellie laughed and said, ‘No. I’m getting soft. In fact, I came home and dug out Nina and the Nix from where I’d hidden it, then I had a drink and a think, and then I went and hid it again. In other words, I’ve no idea how to cope. So I decided to go with the flow and when Rosie wanted to go back to school, I said, OK, why not?’
‘That sounds sensible.’
‘Yeah, except I did start wondering if it was just a way of getting out from under this madwoman who’d turned from a straightforward modern laissez-faire mum to an overbearing, over-anxious, ever-present earth mother. OK. No need to say it. That’s me all over. Self-centred. Everything comes back to me.’
‘You said it. But everything includes all the pain and worry too, so don’t whip yourself too hard with them scorpions.’
‘My, we are full of literature this morning. Othello again?’
‘The Bible. My father was an archdeacon, remember, so you can hardly feel threatened by that.’
Daphne gave as good as she got, thought Ellie, which was one of the reasons she liked her.
She said, ‘Listen, can you stay for lunch? I’d really like to talk. Or we could go out and get a sandwich at the pub.’
‘Sorry, I’m on my way to the Mossy Bank Garden Centre, would you believe? It’s the other side of the bypass and as I was going to be so close, I couldn’t resist dropping in to see how you were. Patrick and I are lunching in their caff, God help us. He’s been advising them on roses and I think he feels the sight of his expensive wife will help prepare them for the sight of his expensive bill. I’d suggest you came but I think your Save the Peatbogs T-shirt might be counterproductive. I could manage a drink this evening though.’
‘Shit. I’ve got my Liberata group coming round.’
‘What’s that? Plastic kitchenware or one of those sexy undies groups?’
‘No, the Liberata Trust’s a human rights organization, sort of Amnesty with feminist attitude… oh, ha ha.’
She saw from her friend’s face that she was being sent up.
Daphne said, ‘Oh well, if you’d rather save the world than have a drink with your friend…’
‘Yeah, yeah. Truth is, the world’s had to look after itself over the past couple of months. I’ve been feeling guilty – yes, I know; there I go again – so when Feenie rang about the next meeting, I said why not have it round here?’
‘Feenie? You don’t mean Serafina Macallum, the mad bag lady?’
‘That’s right. Our founder, chair and driving force. How on earth do you know her?’
‘She sold us the bothy. Or at least her lawyer did. We never met her during the negotiations, but I’ve come close to being run down by her several times, both in that clapped-out Land Rover she drives, and on that ancient bike. You’d think she had something against me.’
Ellie concealed the thought that this was probably truer than Daphne guessed. She knew that what Feenie Macallum resented about the break up of her family estate wasn’t losing bits of property but the kind of people she had to lose them to.
Her own ignorance of the details of the Aldermanns’ purchase of a country cottage lay in her knee-jerk disapproval when Daphne had mentioned it a couple of years earlier.
‘Patrick loves to see the kids and their friends enjoying themselves but he does go white when he sees them turning the garden into a football pitch or a badminton court, so I said, Why don’t we buy a chunk of unspoilt countryside which they can then spoil to their hearts’ content,’ she’d said.
And Ellie hadn’t been able to bite back the caustic comment that helping put the price of rural housing out of the reach of other people’s children hardly seemed a proportionate solution to Patrick’s concern for his precious roses.
The cottage hadn’t been much mentioned between them thereafter, and when it was, Ellie hadn’t been able to decide if Daphne’s insistence on calling it the bothy was diplomatic understatement or provocative meiosis. Nor was she really sure whether her own attitude was pure social indignation or part dog-in-the-manger envy.
Now she wished she hadn’t been so quick to make it a no-go area, both conversationally and geographically, as her certainty that Feenie Macallum would have soaked the purchasers for as much as she could get, then put the money to some very good use, would have allowed her to have her cake and eat it.
‘Anyway,’ continued Daphne, ‘she doesn’t look as if she knows what day of the week it is. Ring her up, tell her she’s got it wrong.’
‘Feenie is as sharp as a butcher’s knife,’ retorted Ellie. ‘And there are others concerned and I’ve mucked them about once already. The meeting should have been yesterday, but when I thought I was going to be riding herd on the school outing, I had to ring round everybody and rearrange. Oh God. I forgot to remind Peter they were coming.’
‘Never mind,’ said Daphne. ‘What pleasanter surprise can there be for a hard-working bobby than to come home and find his house full of anarchist do-gooders? So let’s see if we can find a window in your crowded calendar. Lunch sometime later this week? Patrick’s going to some horticultural conference in Holland in the morning, Diana’s down at her cousin’s in Dorset and David’s at the bothy with some sixth-form chums. God, you are lucky to be in the State system. Costs you nothing and they spend most of their time at school, while we pay a fortune and ours are hardly ever there!’
Ellie smiled, but didn’t rise. A wise avenger picks her own payback time. Lunch at Rosemont, which invariably consisted of Marks and Sparks goodies tarted up to look home-made, should provide a good launch pad.
‘That sounds great,’ she said. ‘Any day but tomorrow. We’re going out to Enscombe. They’ve got some kind of menagerie at the Hall. Ed Wield, who lives in the village, was foolish enough to mention it to Rosie and she didn’t leave him alone till he promised to show her round.’
‘Wield? That’s the ugly sergeant, isn’t it? Didn’t you say he was a bit…?’
Daphne made a rocking gesture with her hand.
‘Gay?’ said Ellie. ‘That’s right. Except not a bit. All of him. And despite anything you learned at Sunday School, it doesn’t mean he lies in wait for small children.’
‘Never thought it did,’ said Daphne. ‘He struck me as a very nice man. And I recall Daddy saying that he preferred his curates gay, as it was easier to look after the choir when the curate was around than it was to look after the curate with the Mothers’ Union in full cry. Now I must whizz off and earn my keep. A garden centre caff! The mind boggles.’
‘Regards to Patrick,’ said Ellie. ‘And watch out for greenfly.’
She waved her friend goodbye, noting with self-mocking envy that since last they met she’d changed her car again for a sporty Audi, gave another wave to DC Dennis Seymour, and went back inside.
Mention of her Liberata meeting reminded her that she’d promised herself to do a bit of preparation. She’d completely neglected this and most other commitments during the past few weeks, but when Feenie Macallum asked questions, a wise acolyte had answers. She went back upstairs and switched on the laptop. There were no visible aftereffects of the coffee and she clicked on Liberata in her Documents and studied the names that came up. These were the women Feenie had allocated to her to be in correspondence with. Most were in prison. All were in trouble. Few were able to reply, so writing to them was often an act of faith. But as Feenie said, even if the letter is intercepted, it tells someone out there that we know these women exist and are victims, and that might make the difference between life and death.
She selected the first on her list, Bruna Cubillas, the first alphabetically but also the first in Ellie’s affections. There’d been replies from Bruna, enough for a real relationship to be established, and written with an intensity of feeling that took Ellie by surprise. She’d mentioned this to Feenie, who’d said, ‘If someone offers you a helping hand when you’re drowning, you grip tight.’
She began to write.
Dear Bruna,
How are you? I am sorry I have not written to you for so long but my life was turned upside down a little while ago.
She paused and tried to think how turned upside down could be rendered in Spanish. She usually made some attempt to translate the more idiomatic bits of her letters, though perhaps by now it wasn’t necessary. Bruna had said she was keen to build on her smattering of English, and asked for some books to help her. Ellie had sent off a boxful, ranging from The House at Pooh Corner to a complete Shakespeare, but what progress she might have made Ellie had no idea. A hasty postscript to Bruna’s last letter had offered a gracias for ‘the book’, meaning presumably the suspicious and repressive prison regime had allowed only one of her boxful through. That was, she worked it out, almost a year ago. Ellie had written several letters since, but her last had been several weeks before Rosie’s illness. She thought ruefully of how flimsy a thing her concern for this poor imprisoned and probably tortured woman thousands of miles away had proved in the presence of immediate and personal pain, but she couldn’t feel guilty. Once, perhaps, but not now. Am I growing more or less selfish?
She returned her attention to the letter.
How much of her recent trauma should she lay out here? Feenie’s words came back to her. ‘Tell them everything about yourself,’ she commanded. ‘However trite, however tragic. That way they’ll know you really care, you’re not just dishing up nourishing broth for the peasants. What you’re doing is letting them know there is a real world still going on beyond their prison walls, there are real people still living their lives beyond the blank faces of their guards and torturers.’
But when Ellie had asked for information about Bruna, Feenie had shaken her head.
‘Best you don’t know,’ she said. ‘These women live under regimes and in circumstances you can’t imagine. Sometimes they are totally innocent, but sometimes they may have done things which you in your ignorance could find hard to understand or justify. All you need to know is that they are suffering cruel and unnatural treatment. It is your task to give them hope. What they give you in return is up to them.’
Ellie began typing again.
My little girl Rosie was taken ill…
The phone rang.
Irritated, she went next door into the bedroom and picked up the receiver.
‘What?’ she bellowed.
‘Charming. I wish I hadn’t bothered.’
‘Daphne, is that you? What’s up? You forget something?’
‘Only how brusque you can be. Listen, I just thought I’d ring you to tell you you’re being watched.’
‘Yes, I know. Dennis Seymour. I thought you said he spoke to you…’
‘Don’t be so dim, Ellie. I don’t mean him. You know those plane trees on that little triangle of no-man’s-land at the corner of your road? Well, I noticed this fellow hanging about there when I drove past earlier. Only then, not knowing anything about yesterday’s punch-up at the Pascoe corral, I didn’t pay much heed. But when I passed the trees just now and saw he was still there, still looking towards your house, I thought, Hello-Hello-Hello, this looks like one for a citizen’s arrest.’
‘Daphne, don’t you dare! Don’t do anything. I’ll get the guy on watch to deal.’
‘So what are you going to do? Run out of the house and point this way? No, listen, untwist your knickers. Count up to a hundred. All I’m going to do is get out of the car and stroll back towards him and distract him with brilliant conversation. When you get to a hundred, then head out to your guardian angel and send him winging this way as quick as he likes. And if chummy here tries to do a runner, I’ll stick my leg out and send him sprawling, a tactic for which I was once renowned in Mid-Yorkshire girls’ hockey circles.’
‘No,’ insisted Ellie. ‘Do nothing. I’ll –’
‘Start counting. One, two, three…’
The phone went dead.
Ellie didn’t hesitate. She went sprinting down the stairs, out of the house, down the drive, waving and calling to the watching Seymour. He spotted her and started to get out of the car.
‘No!’ she screamed. ‘Stay there! Start up!’
He was, God be thanked, quick-witted enough to obey.
‘Turn, turn, turn! Go, go, go!’ commanded Ellie, scrambling into the passenger seat.
‘Where are we going?’ he asked calmly as he accelerated through a U-turn, getting the car up to sixty in about nine seconds.
‘We’re there!’ she yelled. ‘Stop. Oh, sweet Jesus.’
The car snaked to a halt alongside the plane trees.
A figure slumped against one of them, head thrown back to show a face which was a mask of blood.
‘Call an ambulance,’ cried Ellie, leaping from the car and rushing towards her friend. ‘Daphne, are you all right?’
The woman made a gasping noise which may or may not have been an answer, but at least her eyes were open and she was moving and breathing.
‘Why didn’t you wait?’ Ellie couldn’t stop herself from asking as she knelt to examine the damage. ‘Oh Jesus. What a mess. Is it just your face or are you hurt anywhere else?’
‘…aar…’ gasped Daphne.
‘What? Where?’
‘Car. Bastard took my car. Oh God. Look at the state of this blouse.’
vii
a pint of guinness
‘That’s two days in succession our street’s been full of police cars,’ said Ellie. ‘The neighbours are going to start complaining about you bringing your work home.’
‘They should think themselves lucky I’m not a rock star,’ said Pascoe.
‘We should all think ourselves lucky for that,’ said Ellie.
They were at the hospital, to which Ellie had accompanied Daphne in the ambulance. Pascoe had arrived almost simultaneously. He could see she was seriously stressed, but coping by dint of having someone else to look after. Activity had always been her way of dealing with life’s ambushes.
She’d told him what little she knew. Daphne had gasped out her car number and the policeman on watch had put out an alert. Apart from that, she had on Ellie’s insistence concentrated on using her mouth for breathing.
‘Peter, how’re you doing? You here for Mrs Aldermann?’
Dr John Sowden was an old acquaintance, almost an old friend, of Pascoe’s. They had first met at the intersection of a police and medical case and perhaps because that had marked out so clearly the parameters of their areas of common ground, their friendship had somehow only flourished in miniature, like a bonsai tree.
‘That’s right. How is she?’
‘Fine, considering someone’s given her a fair bang on the nose. Broken but I think we’ll get away without surgery.’
‘Any other injuries?’
‘No. Some shock from the assault and the loss of blood, but nothing that a good night’s rest won’t put right. I’ve got a nurse cleaning her up now, then she’ll be ready to go home. What is it? Your friendly neighbourhood mugging? Were you with her when it happened, Ellie? Can check you out as well, if you like.’
He was looking at the blood on her T-shirt.
‘No, thanks,’ said Ellie. ‘This is Daphne’s. I got there later. I’m fine.’
It wasn’t a complete lie. She consulted her body and mind and found that she felt a lot better than she thought she ought to. Perhaps like a vampire I need blood to feed on, she thought, watching as Pascoe, with an apologetic smile in her direction, drew Sowden a little way along the corridor and spoke to him in a low voice.
When he rejoined her she said, ‘So?’
‘So you heard it all. He wasn’t keeping anything back for my ears only.’
‘Well, I’m pleased about that, else this new, violent doppelgänger of mine might have been tempted to break his nose too.’
But she smiled as she said it. She liked John Sowden. He was pretty sound on issues like abortion and euthanasia and he had a mouth to die for.
A few moments later they were allowed into the treatment room where they found Daphne sitting on the edge of a bed, drinking tea.
She said, ‘Ellie, have you seen the state of me? I shall have to go into purdah for a month at least.’
‘No, you look fine, honestly. You’ll have those English-rose looks back in no time.’
‘An English rose I don’t mind but not when I’m wearing it bang in the middle of my face. Oh God, has anyone been in touch with Patrick? No way I can go to the garden centre like this. They’d probably spray me with an anti-black-spot mixture.’
‘I tried your home number on my mobile,’ said Pascoe. ‘No reply. Give us the name of this garden centre and I’ll make sure he gets a message to come here and collect you.’
‘No, please. Just say I can’t make it to lunch, I’ll see him at home later,’ said Daphne firmly. ‘It’s called Mossy Bank. Thank you, Peter, you’re a darling.’
Pascoe stepped aside to make the call and Ellie sat on the bed next to her friend and put her arm around her.
‘Watch out for blood,’ said Daphne. ‘This blouse is ruined.’
‘It’ll come out,’ said Ellie. ‘And I’m well spattered already.’
‘Are you? Let me see. Oh, I’m sorry. I hope it’s not one of your best.’
Ellie, knowing well Daphne’s view that baggy T-shirts, especially those printed with subversive messages, were the nadir of style and taste, laughed out loud and said, ‘I’ll insist that you personally buy me an exact replacement in the market. So, my girl, what the hell did you think you were playing at, provoking this hoodlum? He might have had a knife or a gun or anything.’
‘Didn’t see why you should have all the fun. But why is it when a snotty-nosed Trot like you mixes with the lowlife, you get to kick them in the balls, while a respectable Tory lady like me ends up in hospital?’
Before Ellie could answer, Pascoe rejoined them, saying, ‘That’s done. Daphne, I hope you haven’t been telling Ellie your tale because you’re just going to have to tell it to me again.’
‘She was just going to start,’ said Ellie.
‘I was just going to tell you it was all your fault, actually,’ said Daphne. ‘I had it all sorted. I was going to stroll up to this fellow and distract his attention. Then while he had his back turned on your house (after the count of one hundred, remember?), you were going to get your guardian angel to come scooting along to make an arrest. Except that just as I got to him, you came belting out of your driveway, waving your arms and screaming at that poor policeman in the car. Naturally my man realized something was up and turned to make his getaway. Equally naturally, I attempted to grapple with him and keep him there. Upon which he nutted me, I think is the phrase. It’s something I’ve often seen on the telly and I’ve always assumed its effect was a touch exaggerated, like people in Westerns being hurled backwards when someone shoots them. Now I know better. It’s a funny thing how much closer I’ve got to the realities of lowlife since I met you, Ellie.’
‘It’s another funny thing,’ said Ellie, ‘that now you can’t talk down your nose, you sound almost normal.’
‘Daphne,’ said Pascoe quickly. ‘This man, can you describe him?’
‘Well, he was furtive, you know. Perhaps not so much furtive as simply loitering. That’s what made me notice him, though, as I told Ellie. I wouldn’t really have paid any attention if she hadn’t told me about her dreadful experience of yesterday…’
As Daphne Aldermann got older, she sounded more and more like an archdeacon’s daughter, thought Pascoe. Or rather the way you expected an archdeacon’s daughter to sound in an old black and white play, circumlocutory and slightly prissy, with audible inverted commas appearing round any modernism. She should have been a judge. Or at least a magistrate. Yes, she was precisely the type of woman who, despite valiant efforts to broaden the selectorate, still dominated on the magisterial bench. Not that she’d ever shown the slightest ambition in the direction so far as he knew. And while she might make bath sound like an American novelist, she could pronounce the shibboleth which got you admitted to Ellie’s friendship so there had to be more to her than met the eye. Which was probably true of her husband also. A quiet, charming man who lived for roses, he had been in the frame for not one but several apparently accidental deaths. Nothing was ever proved, and in his company Pascoe blushed to recall his suspicions. And yet… and yet…
‘Could you describe him, please, Daphne?’ he said.
‘Yes, of course. Sorry, I’m jabbering a bit, aren’t I? First time I’ve been assaulted, you see. Comes as a shock, especially when the motive isn’t sexual. No, that’s a stupid thing to say, it would obviously have been a much greater shock if he’d then gone on to rape me. What I mean is, he just nutted me as if… well, as if I were a man.’
‘Not an English gentleman then?’ murmured Pascoe, winning a Medusa glare from Ellie. ‘Sorry.’
‘No. You’re right. I mean, I’m not saying he wasn’t English, or British anyway. As Ellie keeps on telling me, we’re a rainbow society now. But he certainly wasn’t Anglo-Saxon. He was dark, not negroid, just well-grilled, like Ellie. I wish I tanned like that but with my colouring all you get’s a splotchy pink. Still, they say nowadays it’s bad for you, too much sun, gives you skin cancer… not that I’m suggesting for one moment, dear, that you’re in danger of that. No, I’m sure in your case it’s all down to natural pigmentation…’
‘Putting aside the interesting question of Ellie’s ethnic origins,’ said Pascoe, ‘you’re saying this fellow was well-tanned? Hair?’
‘Yes, of course. Sorry, I mean it was black, cut short, I don’t mean shaven, not like those – do they still call them bovver boys?’
‘The term is, I believe, a trifle passé,’ said Pascoe. ‘So, short hair. Moustache? Beard?’
‘Yes, now I come to think of it, he did have a moustache,’ said Daphne. ‘Not a big one. Short too. Like his hair. In fact, he was very neat generally, almost dapper. He would have made a very good head waiter at a decent restaurant.’
Was she taking the piss? He glanced at Ellie, who gave him her sardonic smile. She had once advised him, not much point in mocking Daphne when she’s so much better at it herself. But it was hard to resist the temptation. And she seemed to enjoy it in a harmlessly flirty kind of way. Harmless because there wasn’t the slightest sign he turned her on, and he himself had never gone overboard on English roses, who, in a metamorphosis which might have been of interest to Ovid, often seemed to age into English horses.
Whatever, the technique finally got him a pretty good description. Not very big, five-six, five-seven maybe, slim build, thin face, sharp-nosed, wearing a dark-blue lightweight jacket of good cut (Daphne had an eye for clothes), well-pressed light-grey slacks without turn-ups, wine-coloured loafers (this with a moue of distaste), an open-necked powder-blue shirt, and a gold chain with some sort of medallion round his neck.
‘Excellent,’ said Pascoe. ‘Hang on.’
He raised Control on his mobile and passed on the description. In return he was told that the Audi had been found.
‘That’s quick,’ said Pascoe.
‘Didn’t get far. Leyburn Road. A shopping parade. You know it, sir?’
‘Know it? I owe money there.’
It was five minutes’ drive from his house, ten minutes’ walk via the recreation ground.
‘Who’s there?’ he asked.
‘Sergeant Wield.’
That was good. Everything would be in smooth running order.
‘Pass him the description,’ said Pascoe, unnecessarily, he was sure, but he said it anyway. Ellie, who’d picked up the gist, was hissing something at him.
‘What?’
‘The car, is it OK?’
For a second the words who the hell cares about the sodding car? formed in his mind. But the answer was too obvious for them to get near his lips. Ellie cared. Not about the car, but about the fact that her friend had been hurt acting, albeit unasked, on her behalf. Her concern about the car was, literally, a damage-limitation exercise.
‘Is the Audi OK?’ he asked.
‘Far as we know, no problem. Just neatly parked.’
‘Thanks.’ He switched off and said, ‘The Audi’s parked in Leyburn Road. It looks fine.’
‘That’s something, isn’t it, Daph?’
Daphne managed a smile at her friend and said, ‘Yes, that’s something.’
She doesn’t give a damn either, thought Pascoe. But she understands what Ellie’s on about.
He said, ‘OK if we move on? This guy, did he speak at all?’
‘Not a word. What in the circumstances do you think he might have found to say?’
‘Well, something like, Take that, you bitch, when he hit you.’
‘Take that, you bitch? Really, Peter, you’re so old-fashioned sometimes. No, he said nothing, or nothing I heard. What I did hear was my Audi revving up and I thought, the bastard’s stealing my car.’
‘You’d left the key in the ignition?’
‘Yes, and my mobile phone on the dash. Is that still there, by the way? No, of course you won’t know. Stupid of me, now I come to think of it. If I’d got chummy to the car, he’d have been dead suspicious soon as he realized I could have rung for help, wouldn’t he?’
‘Not as suspicious as he’d have been when he turned the key and the engine started first time,’ smiled Pascoe. ‘I’ll check out the phone. There’ll be a car waiting to take you home soon as you’re ready.’
He left Daphne in Ellie’s care and went out. Dennis Seymour was waiting for him in the corridor, looking anxious. Reason told him his watching brief hadn’t extended to covering all Mrs Pascoe’s friends and acquaintance, but he knew from personal experience that in the matter of a man’s family, reason did not always apply. But Pascoe was not in the accusing mood.
He said, ‘So, Dennis. You been racking your brains for me?’
‘Yes, sir. Sorry. Nothing more than what I told you. Like I said, I took a note of every vehicle that went along the street while I was on watch. Nothing acting suspiciously. Control’s checked the numbers. Nothing dodgy. All good citizens, nothing known.’
‘OK. Try this for size.’
Pascoe repeated Daphne’s description of her assailant.
Seymour said, ‘No. Didn’t see anyone like that in any of the cars. As for on foot, I saw nobody except the postman. I’m really sorry.’
‘Don’t be. It takes up space in your mind and I want every iota of your attention focused on Mrs Pascoe. In your sights at all times, OK?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Right. I’m on my way to Leyburn Road.’
Seymour watched Pascoe go with relief. No bollocking, no attempt to suggest he was at fault. But sometimes Pascoe being quiet and reasonable could be as intimidating as Fat Andy Dalziel on the rampage.
In Leyburn Road he found Wield watching the Audi getting a preliminary going-over by a white-overalled technician. There was a mobile phone on the dash.
‘How’s Mrs Aldermann?’ asked the sergeant.
‘Stiff upper lip, literally,’ said Pascoe. ‘Nose broken, some shock, but still talking. And making sense. What’s happening here?’
‘I’ve got a couple of lads checking the shops to see if anyone noticed the car arriving or anyone fitting your description. Also, they’re asking if the shopkeepers can remember any of their customers in the last hour in case they can come up with something.’
That was good thinking, but Pascoe didn’t say so. Wield would merely be puzzled at being complimented on doing the basics of his job.
Pascoe looked around. The car was parked by the roadside in front of the little shopping complex – grocer, greengrocer, butcher, baker, newsagent, hardware store – which people in the area used conscientiously, aware that letting themselves be lured by the cheaper prices of the superstore only ten minutes’ drive away would soon unleash a drowning shower of rain on the Leyburn Road parade. But the shops were rarely so busy that the assistants wouldn’t have time to glance outside occasionally.
The technician backed carefully out of the Audi and straightened up with a groan of relief.
Pascoe said, ‘Anything?’
The man shook his head and said, ‘Sorry. Looks like he was careful. Everything wiped clean.’
‘Thanks, anyway,’ said Wield. ‘What now, Pete? I’m out of ideas.’
Pascoe smiled as if at an absurdity and said, ‘OK, let’s suppose this guy left his own car here and walked round to watch my house because he felt he’d draw less attention on foot. He steals Daphne’s car because he needs to get back here quick, but he isn’t panicking. He still takes time to wipe his prints. If he’s as cool as that, he wouldn’t park next to his own car because that’s the kind of thing that draws attention, a man jumping out of one car and getting straight into another. So he parks, gets out, and walks.’
As if doing a reconstruction, Pascoe set off at a brisk pace with Wield in close pursuit.
‘Doesn’t help us unless we get a witness saw him walking,’ panted the sergeant.
‘I know. But listen, parking’s bad around here. Not a lot of room.’
Wield could see he was right, but not what he was getting at. In front of the shops there was kerbside parking space for only half a dozen cars. In one direction Leyburn Road curved into a double-yellow-line bend and in the other it ran into the busy ring road via a roundabout, beside which stood a pseudo-Victorian shiny-tiles-and-leaded-lights pub, the Gateway.
It was the pub Pascoe was heading for.
As he walked he explained, ‘When it’s busy here, shoppers often use the pub car park. Billy Soames, the landlord, wants to avoid getting into dispute with the shopkeepers, so he’s put up a sign at the entrance: No charge to shoppers, but it helps if you at least buy a packet of crisps in the bar! Could be that’s where chummy parked his own car. Let’s ask Billy if he noticed a small suntanned man with a moustache using his facilities this morning.’
‘Why not?’ said Wield.
His mobile rang. He put it to his ear and listened. When he switched off, Pascoe, who, like an astronomer after a lifetime’s study of the pocked and pitted surface of the moon, had learned to interpret a few of the sergeant’s expressions, said, ‘You look pleased.’
‘Something I recalled from house-to-house yesterday. One of your neighbours, Mrs Cavendish, noticed a car stopping at the end of the street then turning back when all the troops had turned up. Didn’t seem important then. But it popped into my mind just now when we got Mrs Aldermann’s description of the man who attacked her, so I checked it out.’
‘And?’
‘Her words were, the man was swarthy, moustachioed and sinister.’
‘That sounds like old Mrs C.,’ said Pascoe. ‘And the car?’
‘Metallic-blue. Sounds like a Golf. Could be owt or nowt but the description fits, sort of. She half remembered a bit of the number too, so if it turns out there was a blue Golf in the pub car park…’
‘Anyone ever tell you you’re a treasure?’ said Pascoe.
‘Not since breakfast. By the by, that guy we talked about this morning, the student, Franny Roote. I never saw him. This sound anything like?’
‘Not like the way he was back then. Size might fit, but he was blond.’
‘Perhaps prison’s turned him black.’
‘Perhaps. I’ll find out tomorrow. Somehow I doubt he’s got anything to do with this, but if he has, could be the sight of me will make a good gloat irresistible.’
‘You still fancy Cornelius, do you?’
‘Don’t know. Maybe. There’s something odd going on there. You know that they found this message on her computer at the bank? It just said, TIME TO GO. And there was another on her e-mail at her apartment. STILL HERE? OH DEAR. Unsourced, but dated the day she took off. So there’s someone in the background.’
‘Ollershaw, you think? Trying to scare her into making a run for it? But he didn’t want her caught and talking, so now he wants to pressure you to get her out?’
Wield’s tone was dubious.
‘Doesn’t sound likely, does it?’ said Pascoe. ‘And I tend to agree with Andy about Ollershaw. Slippery but not physical. Anyway, I’m back in court with her tomorrow, so if someone really is trying to twist my arm to go easy opposing the bail application, then they’ll need to get in touch soon.’
They had reached the pub.
The landlord greeted them with the wariness all landlords exhibit on spotting the fuzz on the premises, but soon relaxed when he understood the nature of their enquiries. Inured by long experience to disappointment or at best ambiguity, Pascoe was almost taken aback when Billy Soames said instantly, ‘Yeah. Sure. I remember them.’
‘Them?’
‘That’s right. I saw them arrive, two of them got out of the car, the little dark one set off down the road and the other one came in and ordered a pint of Guinness and a bag of crisps. First customer of the day. He sat there reading his paper for maybe three-quarters of an hour, then his mate looked through the door and sort of beckoned like he was in a hurry. And the pop-eyed one got up straightaway and went out.’
‘Pop-eyed? What do you mean?’
‘He had these sort of bulging eyes. Light-coloured hair going a bit thin. About forty. Big scar, newish-looking, along the left side of his head. Pasty complexion, didn’t look like he spent much time in the sun.’
‘And the car? Did you spot the make, Billy?’
‘Merc sports. White.’
‘Oh. Not a blue Golf,’ said Pascoe stupidly.
The landlord gave Pascoe a long-suffering look and said judiciously, ‘Well, it wasn’t blue, it was white, and it wasn’t a Golf, it was a Merc, so I’d have to say no, Peter, unless I’m deceived, it wasn’t a blue Golf. Sorry to be such a disappointment.’
‘You’ve done great,’ Pascoe assured him.
Wield said, ‘Where was he sitting?’
‘Over there. By the window.’
Wield wandered across and picked up a newspaper from the windowsill.
‘Was this the paper he was reading?’
‘Probably.’
Carefully Wield fitted the paper into an evidence bag.
‘Which way did the car go?’ asked Pascoe.
‘Out onto the bypass,’ said the landlord. ‘All this any help to you?’
‘Oh yes,’ said Pascoe, knowing the value of friendly eyes and ears in public houses. ‘Tremendous. Billy, you are a prince among publicans.’
‘I’ll remember that next time I’m being hassled about after-hours drinking.’
‘Anything else you can tell us about the man you served?’
‘Popeye? Not really. Didn’t have much of a crack, got a delivery just after I served him. Except the way he spoke, that is.’
‘And how was that?’
‘Well, drinking the Guinness it didn’t surprise me. He was Irish.’
viii
spelt from Sibyl’s leaves
I’m Popeye the pop-up man…
So called because he’s harder to keep down than Bounce-back Bill Clinton.
Started way back on Bloody Sunday when eleven-year-old schoolboy Patrick Ducannon, uninvolved son of uninvolved parents got shot by the paras.
Registered d.o.a. at Belfast Infirmary, but sat up and asked for his mammy when the priest dropped some hot candle wax on him. (Well, that’s the crack, and why not? No reason the devil and Gaw Sempernel should have all the good stories.)
After that, of course he was involved.
And very unlucky or very lucky depending on how close to him you were standing.
Age twenty: dragged out of an exploded bomb factory in Derry covered with burnt flesh and bleeding offal, most of which turned out to belong to his two fellow ham-fisted bombardiers who in death proved so inseparable they had to be buried in the same grave.
Age twenty-four: shot as he drove a stolen car through a checkpoint. Car crashed through a wall and rolled down a railway embankment. Three passengers killed instantaneously. Popeye crawled out of the wreckage and ran down a tunnel from which he emerged a few moments later pursued by a train. Three days in hospital, three years in jail.
Age twenty-nine: shot, stabbed and beaten by a unit of the UVF as he lay in his bed with his girlfriend. She died four days later. He went to her funeral.
Age thirty-three: retired from active service with the IRA, perhaps because of his reputation for out-living everyone he worked closely with. Became a quartermaster, specializing in the acquisition of cutting-edge weaponry which was put in deep storage against the long promised day of total insurrection.
Kept out of trouble for a while till one winter’s night in Liverpool docks he turned up in the cab of a truck carrying a consignment of arms which we knew had been landed somewhere on the east coast during the previous forty-eight hours.
Straightforward search-and-detain operation went haywire when one of the Provos suddenly reached into his jacket pocket. By the time it was established he was suffering an anxiety asthma attack and was pulling out his inhaler, he was dead, as were two of his companions and even Popeye, naturally the sole survivor, was seriously injured. Worse still (in the Great Gaw’s eyes at least, for he was in charge of the operation), the truck turned out to be carrying only a small part-load of ammo and a few rifles, not the large consignment of state-of-the-art weaponry Gaw had expected.
It must have been cached en route and there was only you left, Pop-up Popeye, who had any idea where.
That got you off the NHS waiting list and into Gaw’s own favourite hospital where you got better care than a royal who was a fully paid up member of BUPA. But it was still a close-run thing. Intensive care for two months, convalescent for another six, offered a deal which you refused so reluctantly that it was hard not to believe your medically supported claim that your injuries had left you seriously amnesiac.
The court, however, was unimpressed by this as a defence against the long list of charges prepared against you.
Sentenced to twelve years.
So Popeye the pop-up man, it looked like the system had done what its trained shooters couldn’t and buried you.
But…
I’m Popeye the pop-up man
Let them hit me as hard as they can
I’ll be here at the finish…
Came the peace process.
Age thirty-seven: released from jail after serving less than two years.
Maybe it was enough.
You and I have a lot in common, Popeye. Members of ruthless and dangerous organizations, we have both had to learn to survive any which way we could.
And we both have unfinished business with Gawain Sempernel. Or rather, I have unfinished business with him while he has unfinished business with you.
He’s going soon. He thinks no one beneath him knows it but you cannot keep a Sibyl and a secret at the same time.
And you, Popeye, are his farewell finger to the envious gods who he believes cannot bear such rival effulgence near their throne. Six months from now he hopes to be clasped to the bosom of our common alma mater, in the holy shrine of a Master’s Lodge, where he will sit with one buttock firmly on the faces of those poor dons whose careers are in his gift, and the other discreetly offered for former colleagues to kiss when they beat a path to his door in search of that advice and expertise only his lost omniscience can offer.
The poor sod has overdosed on Deighton and Le Carré!
So there you are, Popeye. We have both been screwed by Gaw Sempernel.
In fact, you could say that, thanks to him, in our different ways we both know what it is to exist locked up in a cell.
And now, though I am officially the turnkey, we find ourselves cheek by jowl in this cell within a cell that the great comedian Gaw calls Sibyl’s Leaves.
Imprisonment changes people. It gives them time to think.
I think a lot.
Popeye too. What he thought was probably something like – it’s coming to an end. Maybe I can finally get a life which doesn’t involve my old body being full of bullets and surrounded by corpses. I’ve survived the war, surely it can’t be all that hard to survive the peace?
It was going to be harder than you could have dreamt, Popeye.
You found a movement split and splintering under pressure of internal debate as to how to proceed in face of the new situation.
Worse, despite your continuing claims of amnesia, you found yourself courted by the most extreme groups for your knowledge of where the arms were hidden.
There must have been lots of heated debate.
There were certainly hairy moments when you were threatened with having the information tortured out of you by men who thought that Amnesia was a popular Far Eastern sexual tourism centre.
Still, a man who has survived being interrogated by Gaw Sempernel can survive anything.
But something had to give.
Finally, confused as to whether you were victor or victim, unable to understand whether you’d got what you’d been fighting for or not, you decided like many a thwarted philosopher before you that it was time to cultivate your own garden.
Maybe it was now your memory came back. Maybe it had never gone.
And if it brought you peril, it might as well bring you profit too.
Uniting for safety with a small group of fellow disenchanted releasees who thought that being applauded onto the platform at a Republican meeting was little enough reward for what they’d been through, you advertised for customers. And when you found your former colleagues less than keen to pay for what they regarded as already their own, you looked further afield.
A couple of minor but lucrative European and near-East deals followed. But your ace-in-the hole, the ‘biggie’ which was going to make your retirement fortune was the cache of state-of-the-art guns and missiles you’d left buried somewhere deep in enemy country during that cross country trip which ended in the Liverpool fiasco.
We know now (and as usual with Popeye, we’ve got the bodies to prove it) that the chosen site was a remote and inaccessible spur of Kielder Forest on the English/Scottish border.
For this cache you wanted a customer with serious money.
What you found was PAL, the smallest but most extreme of the Colombian guerilla groups, fallen on hard times not so much because of the activities of the official counter-insurgency forces, but because its immodestly, though not altogether inaccurately, self-styled ‘legendary’ leader, Fidel Chiquillo, had managed to get up the noses of high command in both Farc and ELN, the two most powerful rebel organizations.
They set about squeezing PAL out of existence by drying up its source of arms in the Americas. Word was spread; you sell to PAL, you don’t sell to us.
So here we have Chiquillo, desperate to re-establish himself on the Colombian scene, ready to go anywhere to do a deal. He has a contact in Europe, his negotiator, who sniffs out the deal with Popeye.
But even so far afield, deals are not easy for Chiquillo to make.
To get himself safe to the UK, to do the deal securely, then to get the shipment intact to South America, he needs allies powerful enough to ignore Farc, ELN, the drug barons and even the elected government itself.
So he turns to the los Cojos, that is el Consejo Juridico, the national security group whose operations are so clandestine they make the official secret police look like Dixon of Dock Green. Their jefe supremo, Colonel Gonzalo Solis (who lost a foot in a bomb attack in 1981, hence the nickname cojo, the lame one), knows where all the bodies are buried, which is not surprising as he has buried so many of them himself. Colombian politicians need to be nimble-footed indeed to satisfy the conflicting demands of such rapidly changing partners as the guerilla groups, the drug lords, the United Nations and their own electorate, and over many years, El Cojo has come to call the steps. He is the only man powerful enough to guarantee the deal, but even he hesitates before going up against the loose anti-PAL alliance which applies in the Americas.
But in the end the offer of a commission to be paid in Colombia’s favourite currency, pure cocaine, equal to the amount required by Popeye for his weapons proves impossible to resist.
The PAL embargo back home, he decrees, does not apply to deals done in Europe.
And to those in both high and low places who are ready to protest against his decision, he offers a private reassurance that there is no risk of a PAL resurgence. Indeed, quite the contrary. Chiquillo must come personally to close the deal as El Cojo’s guarantee of safe conduct applies only to the guerilla leader himself, not his negotiator. And once the deal is done, the Cojos’ European chief, Jorge Casaravilla, a man so ruthlessly violent that the colonel likes to keep him several thousand miles of blue water away, has instructions to scoop up everything and everyone with extreme prejudice.
Chiquillo agrees to the terms and makes his payment to El Cojo. His negotiator makes the final arrangements, and at last, by ways and means undetectable even by the eagle eye of soaring Gaw and the strange magic of his Sibyl, Chiquillo arrives in the UK and goes with his two Cojos escorts to the rendezvous in Kielder.
Anyone familiar with Popeye Ducannon’s track record might have forecast what happened next.
As always, chaos, catastrophe, corpses, and blood on the forest floor.
And, equally as always, when the gunsmoke settles, Popeye pops up out of the forest with nothing worse than a couple of flesh wounds, a crease along the side of his skull, and a bad headache.
All this and more he tells his one surviving colleague, Jimmy Amis, known as Amity James because of the friendly way he has with him when blowing off your kneecaps.
And all this and more Amity tells us when we pick him up and shake several credit cards under several names out of his pockets and point out that having qualified for early release under the Good Friday Agreement does not disqualify him from early return under the common law.
The more he tells us is that Popeye heard Chiquillo, the other survivor, telling someone on his mobile that he’d be with them at somewhere called the CP in two to three hours.
If he made it, that was. For according to Popeye, Chiquillo had taken a hit.
More importantly to Popeye, he’d taken both the weaponry and the bagful of coke which was payment for it.
Having worked all his life in a twilight world of deceit and betrayal, Popeye isn’t much bothered by the whys and wherefores. All he wants is what he regards as his pension fund back. The only clue he has is what he knows about Chiquillo’s negotiator. This, together with what the Cojos know about Chiquillo himself, might well lead them to both the man and the arms.
Alliances with Jorge Casaravilla are notoriously dangerous.
But so are alliances with Popeye Ducannon!
The last thing he said to Amity James was, ‘I’m just off to see a man about a dog. Or maybe it’s a dog about a man. Mind the shop while I’m gone, will you?’
Since then, absolute silence.
Except in our work as in nature there is no such thing.
Have you heard that silence where the birds are dead, yet something pipeth like a bird?
There’s always something piping.
And here I sit, Sibyl in her lonely cave, recording and replaying till finally I recognize the tune.
Piper, pipe that song again!
They’re still here, that’s what my sensors tell me and that’s what Gaw wants to hear, those arms and the man who stole them, and the drug fortune he didn’t pay for them, all still here hidden away somewhere connected with something contracted to CP. What does my Word Search give me?
Canadian Pacific? It’s a long way round to Colombia!
Cape Province? As above only more so.
Central Park? Worth checking which northern cities have a Central Park.
C.P. Snow? Does anyone still read him, I wonder.
Chelsea pensioner? At least it’s vaguely military.
Command post? So’s this. Right place for arms, I suppose.
Common prostitute? Hardly.
Communist Party? An office? Do they still have offices since glasnost?
Perhaps it was sea followed by something beginning with P?
Or maybe it was Spanish. Si pez? Yes fish. Si pie? Yes foot.
You’re getting silly, girl.
Face it, you’re not expected to work things out, just sit here and feed things in.
While the great giant Gaw is striding around out there, making sure he doesn’t tell anyone, including me, more than they need to know.
Oh, there are things you need to know, Gaw, and one day soon I look forward to telling you them. Then perhaps you’ll realize that walking over people is not a vocation for a true man, or even a grotesque imitation of one.
I’m Popeye the pop-up man
Let them hit me as hard as they can
I’ll be here at the finish
’Cos I eat up my spinach
I’m Popeye, the pop-up man!
ix
bag lady on a bike
Shirley Novello lay back in the front seat of her Fiat Uno.
Well, maybe lay back was stretching it a bit, which was more than even a medium-sized woman like herself could comfortably manage in such a small car. At least she could drive it comfortably, which longer legs would have made difficult. Mind you, a bit of discomfort would have been a cheap price to pay for longer legs. She looked down at hers with a critical eye. Even with ninety-five per cent of them visible as they emerged from a leather skirt hardly broader than a lumberjack’s belt, they couldn’t be termed long. What they could be termed was muscular. And what the hell was wrong with muscular? Muscularity was a quality she greatly admired in men. She found it a turn-on, and saw no reason to bother with people who didn’t return the compliment. Anyway, above the waist she could compete with anyone, she thought complacently, raising her eyes to the straining buttons of her sun top. Not many of those in a kilo ho ho, as the wet wankers in the canteen would say if they ever got wind of the battened-down bounty lurking beneath the sack-like muddy-brown T-shirts she favoured at work. These, plus a matching selection of baggy trousers, had dampened down awareness of her as a woman to the point where the sexist cracks were conventional rather than focused. A cop-out? Not really. A cop-in, more like it; meaning you sussed out the best way to permit yourself to function most efficiently as a cop. Like Sergeant Wield. There were still plenty of mutt-headed myopes around the station who didn’t realize he was gay, and were ready to give you an argument about it. How could anyone who looked like him and talked like him and put the fear of God into you like him be gay? Stands to reason. Wankers!
It was because of Wield that she was here on duty now, dressed in play gear rather than her workaday drabs. She’d been clocking off at four when he’d grabbed her.
‘Shirley, I need a body to spell Seymour watching Mrs Pascoe. Any chance?’
At least he framed it as a question.
She said, ‘Sarge, I’ve got plans for tonight that it’ll cost hearts to break. I can give you till eight if that’s any good.’
‘That’ll do fine. Thanks,’ he’d said.
So he was grateful which was nice. But was he trustworthy? She was due to meet a new boyfriend at a new club, both of which she had high hopes of, at eight thirty. Thirty minutes wasn’t much to get home and changed in even if her relief turned up on time. So, working on the principle that she wasn’t going to be under the gaze of the station neanderthals, she’d come on duty dressed for partying.
Privately she thought this watch on the Pascoe house was overkill. Chummy, who was probably this lad Roote, wasn’t likely to come back for a third go. She’d dug up the case file and he sounded a real nut. It had been back when Pascoe was still an unmarried sergeant and La Pascoe was teaching at a college where the Principal had been topped. Roote had evidently assaulted both Pascoe and the Fat Man, breaking a bottle of Scotch over the latter’s head. Just went to show there was good even in the worst of us! So, bang him up and fix for a patrol car to crawl past maison Pascoe every couple of hours!
Still, overtime was overtime. She turned on Radio One full blast and settled back to fantasize about the muscular young man who was her escort that night.
Then, just before seven, she saw the bag lady.
She was on a bicycle, but she was undoubtedly a bag lady. There were three plastic carriers dangling from the handlebars and another two either side of the saddle. The woman herself was something the far side of seventy, maybe the far side of eighty, with a round leathery face like an under-inflated football and wispy white hair escaping from beneath an unravelling straw hat whose brim looked like a horse had dined on it. Her ample body was draped in several layers of clothing that it would have taken an archaeologist to date. The bike itself was coeval with its rider, or perhaps a little older, its flaking khaki paint suggesting it might have seen service in the Great War.
Novello watched with mild amusement as this figure creaked towards her, then with heightened interest as the machine scraped to a halt, and finally with active alarm as the dismounted woman began to open the Pascoes’ gate.
It was hard to leave the car with dignity, but practise had enabled her to emerge from it with speed. The woman saw her coming and paused by the open gate. It occurred to Novello that if any, or all, of the carriers contained a deadly weapon, she was presenting a pretty unmissable target. A low ornamental wall to her right offered the only real cover and she flinched towards it as the old woman dipped her hand into one of the bags. But all she came out with was a large magnifying glass which she raised to her eyes, the better to study the approaching DC.
‘Excuse me, madam,’ said Novello, pulling out her ID. ‘Detective Constable Novello, Mid-Yorkshire CID. Do you mind telling me who you are and what you’re doing here?’
‘If you experience difficulty in answering these questions yourself, then perhaps you have strayed into the wrong employment, my girl,’ said the woman, in a voice rich with the kind of orotundity Novello only ever heard when she chanced on some ancient actress being interviewed on the telly.
She’ll probably turn out to be the DCI’s gran, she thought, but she persisted. ‘Please, madam. If you could just answer the question.’
‘Very well. I am Serafina Macallum, founder and life president of the Liberata Trust, and I am here to attend, nay, to chair, a meeting of our local group. For the record, and I assume we are being recorded though where the necessary apparatus might be concealed in such a deshabille as yours I cannot imagine, I would like to say that though long resigned to having my phone tapped and my mail interfered with, I had not thought that this so-called democracy of ours had degenerated to such open interference with the free movement of its citizens twice in the space of fifteen minutes.’
‘Twice?’ wondered Novello.
‘When I left my vehicle in the car park of the Gateway public house, I was accosted by a child in uniform under the pretext that he wished to know if I had been there earlier in the day.’
That figured. She’d heard that the landlord of the Gateway had spotted a white Mercedes parked there about midday with a driver fitting Daphne Aldermann’s description of the perp. Wield would have made sure someone went back there to check if any of this evening’s customers had been there at lunchtime and seen or heard anything.
‘And were you?’ asked Novello.
‘Certainly not. You think I do not have better things to do with my time than frequent public houses?’
‘But you’re parked there now,’ said Novello reasonably. ‘Incidentally, why didn’t you just keep on driving and park in the street here?’
‘I drive, reluctantly, on the main highways and some rural byways. But when I reach the environs of the town, I prefer the greater freedom of pedal power, and in addition I do not care to pollute other people’s living space.’
Stark staring, thought Novello. But that doesn’t stop her being the DCI’s gran. In fact, it might be a necessary qualification.
On the other hand, she didn’t have La Pascoe down as being religious which was all that Liberata suggested to her. Still, these days you never could tell.
‘This Liberata thing, that’s as in St Wilgefortis?’ she enquired.
The old woman looked at her sharply, then said, ‘It is good to see how thoroughly your masters brief you.’
‘Not masters. Mistresses. I went to a convent school. For a while anyway. The nuns were very keen to hammer home the important things like the lives of the saints. I’ve still got the broken knuckles to prove it.’
Why am I telling this old bat the story of my schooldays? she wondered. I’ll be telling her why I got thrown out next.
She said abruptly, ‘So Mrs Pascoe’s expecting you?’
‘Of course she is, though no doubt to maximize the harassment, you will wish to go through the motions of ascertaining that for yourself.’
She was right there, thought Novello, following the bicycle up the drive.
She rang the bell while Miss Macallum disengaged her bags from her bike. They were full of cardboard files, clipboards, sheets of newspaper, and other varieties of stationery. Novello noted with amusement that supermarket names printed on the bags had been scored over with a black marker pen.
Catching her gaze, Miss Macallum said, ‘I see no reason why the moguls of Mammon should make me the instrument of their aggrandizement.’
The door opened and Ellie Pascoe appeared.
Her expression gave Novello the information she required without need of question, and more besides.
Yes, Miss Macallum was telling the truth about the meeting, but Ellie Pascoe had forgotten all about it and found the prospect as appealing as a day-old hard-fried egg, an image which came to Novello’s mind as this was the only edible substance she’d found in her flat that morning when she started to prepare breakfast.
She risked a wry sympathetic smile and wished she hadn’t bothered. La P. gave her the cold cut, then her face blossomed into a welcoming smile as she said, ‘Feenie, good to see you. Come on in. Let me help you with your bags.’
Novello waited till the door was closing before saying, ‘Will there be many others, Mrs Pascoe?’
‘Three, maybe four. All women. And I’d prefer it if you didn’t march them all up to the door.’
‘I need to check them out,’ said Novello. ‘Maybe you could give a little signal before you let them in, just to confirm you know them?’
‘A signal?’ said Ellie, with an intonation normally reserved for A handbag? ‘What had you in mind?’
‘Nothing complicated. Just a little wave maybe.’
Ellie nodded and closed the door.
‘You do know how to wave, don’t you, Mrs Pascoe?’ said Novello to the woodwork.
Over the next ten minutes four more women arrived, all looking disappointingly normal after Feenie Macallum. The first three were admitted with a perfunctorily dismissive gesture of La P.’s hand. Only with the fourth was there a hesitation. Then the bag lady appeared behind La P. and spoke, the hand fluttered, the newcomer stepped inside and the door closed.
Novello settled down to pass the remainder of her stag with dreams of her stag to come, but about twenty minutes later she saw the DCI’s car turn into the drive. Pascoe got out and came back through the gateway towards her and she slid out of the Uno once more.
She saw him clocking her legs and the gear, but guessed he’d be too politically correct, or at least too polite, to comment.
‘Hi, Shirley,’ he said. ‘Anything happening?’
‘Yeah. Some kind of prayer meeting, I think.’
She told him about the Liberata Trust. He smiled as if she’d said something funny, but she also saw him repress the cold-fried-egg reaction. Not in front of the servants.
He said, ‘How long have you been here?’
‘Took over from Dennis at four.’
‘Good. I appreciate it.’
He gave her the Pascoe smile. Does he think we won’t be claiming the overtime? she wondered. But then he rubbed his hand across his face and suddenly looked very tired, very vulnerable, and Novello felt a pang of sympathy, but recalling his wife’s dusty response, she didn’t let it show.
‘Any development on the car spotted in the Gateway car park?’ she asked.
‘Not on the car, but one of the two men, the one in the pub, we got a print off his newspaper.’
‘That’s good. Known, sir?’
He hesitated. Wondering whether he wants to share this with underlings, thought Novello resentfully. But when he did reply, her resentment quickly faded.
‘Yes. Patrick Ducannon. He’s IRA, got a twelve-year stretch but out in two after the Good Friday Agreement. Word is he’s given up the cause. Certainly he’s blotted his copybook in Republican circles.’
‘Jesus,’ said Novello. ‘This is serious stuff. And the other guy…?’
‘Nothing. Doesn’t fit any known associate, at least not on our books.’
Meaning it might on somebody else’s? Like the security services whom all regular cops regarded as anal-retentive gits.
‘So this guy parks at the pub because he doesn’t want to be spotted sitting in his car, watching your house, and takes a stroll, thinking he’s safe, only Mrs Aldermann spots him…’
‘That’s how it looks,’ said Pascoe, suddenly impatient. ‘OK, Shirley, you can clock off now.’
‘Sir? I mean, I’m on till eight, then Seymour…’
‘I’ve cancelled Dennis already,’ said Pascoe firmly. ‘When I’m home, I’ll take care of things.’
Things being your wife and daughter, thought Novello. Then told herself, Stop that, Shirley! Why do you find it so hard to be nice to one of the few guys in the Force who’s gone out of his way to see you get an even break?
Answer: because anyone who has to think about treating you equally is treating you differently.
In other words, I’ll only accept help from people who don’t offer it. Which makes me nana of the month!
She said hesitantly, ‘Maybe I should check that out, sir.’
He said, ‘I don’t think so,’ very pleasantly, but with a finality that brooked no denial.
Please yourself, she thought, getting back into her car. Means I can get to the club all that earlier and stop anyone else trying to put a brand on my hunk of beef.
But best to play it safe, and as she drove away, she called Control and put it on record that she was abandoning her watch in response to a direct order from the DCI.
And finally, because she was a good cop as well as an ambitious one, she made a mental note to check out if possible what made the old bag lady so unsurprised to find herself, as she imagined, under surveillance. Probably a waste of time. What could someone as comically decrepit as Feenie Macallum have to do with the real world that a smart young cop lived in? But she’d noticed the DCI’s flicker of amusement when she’d talked about a prayer meeting, and certainly she couldn’t see religion playing a large part in La Pascoe’s profile.
Then she closed her mental notebook, hit the accelerator, and as the tiny engine shook and roared, she gave herself entirely to a matching anticipation of the delights which lay ahead.
x (#ulink_2f800bb6-0762-51a1-8af4-020d0532645e)
spelt from Sibyl’s leaves (#ulink_2f800bb6-0762-51a1-8af4-020d0532645e)
Feenie Macallum…
A blast from the past. Dear old Feenie, whose first entry was probably made with a quill pen on parchment. Box file, card index, microfiche, this Serafina has flown through the lot and here she is, wings neatly folded, sleeping in my casket waiting for the kiss of Sir Gawain to awaken her.
fighting the world with a protest that no one will heed…
except those in need…
What does Daddy think as he looks down upon, or perhaps up at, his beloved daughter? Mungo Macallum, whose Celtic beginnings not even my little electronic moles have been able to dig up. The working classes of the nineteenth century still offered that option which all classes of the twenty-first century would give their eye teeth for – impenetrable obscurity.
But there he was, an exile in Yorkshire at the turn of the century, already a man of brass, busy turning himself into a man of steel.
But not knives and forks and spoons for Mungo. Oh no. He didn’t let himself be dazzled by the bright dawn of this new Edwardian age, he looked beyond that last long garden party of privilege and class, he saw the approaching darkness and knew that this was to be the century of the gun.
Mungo Macallum, the armaments king.
There are some who say that you were the model for Undershaft in Major Barbara, Mungo. Great wealth from a morally dubious source, yet not without your own moral concerns. Poverty you saw as a cause of evil, not an effect. You paid, by the standards of the time, fair wages, and you underwrote the establishment of a savings bank to encourage providence among your workers, and a building society to give those who desired it the chance of buying their own homes.
And you led by example, showing the world how money wisely invested was the basis of prosperity.
In 1914 you were already rich. By 1918 you had wealth beyond computation.
In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
While westward eighty miles or so,
In England’s fields the profits grow.
And in a Yorkshire field, in that remote and peaceful wedge of coastal land called Axness, you found Granary House, a bat-infested, rat-infested ruin of a mansion looking out across the sea, far far away from the glow of the furnaces and the dust of the spoilheaps. Not that you were ever ashamed of the source of your wealth. And when you heard as you rebuilt and refurbished Granary House that your mocking friends were referring to it as Gunnery House, that’s what you officially renamed it.
Here at Gunnery you hoped to found a dynasty in a world which your own weaponry had made safe for your descendants. Lord Macallum of Axness. Oh, your title was all chosen, your coat of arms prepared. Cleverly you forbore to stoop for the windfalls the dying storm of war shook from the many branches of the new and Most Excellent Order of the British Empire. The golden fruit you wanted was not to be scabbed with war-profiteering sneers. Through the twenties you paved the way with charitable deeds. But you could not forbear to make assurance doubly sure by crossing the palms of those who claimed to be able to tell your noble future with gold and silver, and all your hopes died in the Honours for Sale scandal of 1933.
One plan had failed. Another looked like to fail. Three wives (by death, not divorce) had left you with a single child. But not the son you needed to lead off your dynasty.
Yet a man may do something, may do much, with a biddable daughter.
Alas, poor Mungo, what you had was not a biddable daughter.
What you had was Serafina, born as one war ended to come of age as another began.
Serafina, the passionate one.
And, for a while, Serafina, one of us.
For they were all ours for a while, those brave boys and girls who played their merry games in the enemy’s own yard. So many going, so few returning. But for that few, such a bright future, such a world of profit and delight lay ahead in those years after the shooting stopped and the real war, our kind of war, began.
But by that time you, Serafina, had been too long away, had caught a foreign infection, had gone native.
What you saw was not a world in the glorious turmoil of necessary recreation, with populations shifting, new battle lines being drawn up, new alliances formed, a glorious opportunity to play a part in the last and greatest crusade. No, what you saw was individuals suffering pain and deprivation and loss and injustice. Instead of population patterns, you saw refugees. Instead of demographic trends, you saw orphaned children. Instead of the forest, you saw the trees.
Oh, here it all is, Serafina, in your little casket. The charities, the agencies, the foundations, the movements, the causes, and hardly a one of them, to start with, whose strings were not being pulled by us. Or someone somewhere very like us.
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Reginald Hill
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Современная зарубежная литература
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: ‘Luminously written, thrilling, unexpectedly erudite, and beautifully structured’ Geoffrey Wansell, Daily MailWhen Ellie Pascoe finds herself under threat, her husband DCI Peter Pascoe and Superintendent Andy Dalziel assume it’s because she’s married to a cop.While they hunt down the source of the danger, Ellie heads out of town in search of a haven… only to get tangled up in a conspiracy involving Irish arms, Colombian drugs and men who will stop at nothing to achieve their ends.Dalziel eventually concludes the security services are involved, but by then it is too late. Ellie’s on her own – and must dig deep down into her reserves to survive…