Arms and the Women (8 page)

Another silence, then Dalziel said, 'Beats sewing mail-bags 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 to say 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.