Asking for the Moon (24 page)

Giselle, who had driven out during the day to light the fire and make ready for their arrival, had anticipated Dalziel's gut. On the kitchen table lay a pile of sandwiches covered by a sheet of kitchen paper on which she had scribbled an invitation for them to help themselves to whatever they fancied.

Underneath she had written in capitals BE CAREFUL and underlined it twice.

'Nice thought,' said Dalziel, grabbing a couple of the sandwiches. 'Bring the plate through to the living-room and we'll eat in comfort.'

Back in front of the fire with his glass filled once again, Dalziel relaxed in a deep armchair. Pascoe poured himself a drink and looked out of the window again.

'For God's sake, lad, sit down!' commanded Dalziel. 'You're worse than a bloody spook, creeping around like that.'

'Sorry,' said Pascoe.

'Sup your drink and eat a sandwich. It'll soon be midnight. That's zero hour, isn't it? Right, get your strength up. Keep your nerves down.'

'I'm not nervous!' protested Pascoe.

'No? Don't believe in ghosts, then?'

'Hardly at all,' said Pascoe.

'Quite right. Detective-inspectors with university degrees shouldn't believe in ghosts. But tired old superintendents with less schooling than a pit pony, there's a different matter.'

'Come off it!' said Pascoe. 'You're the biggest unbeliever I know!'

'That may be, that may be,' said Dalziel, sinking lower into his chair. 'But sometimes, lad, sometimes . . .'

His voice sank away. The room was lit only by a dark-shaded table lamp and the glow from the fire threw deep shadows across the large contours of Dalziel's face. It might have been some eighteenth-century Yorkshire farmer sitting there, thought Pascoe. Shrewd; brutish; in his day a solid

ram of a man, but now rotting to ruin through his own excesses and too much rough weather.

In the fireplace a log fell. Pascoe started. The red glow ran up Dalziel's face like a flush of passion up an Easter Island statue.

'I knew a ghost saved a marriage once,' he said ruminatively. 'In a manner of speaking.'

Oh Jesus! thought Pascoe. It's ghost stories round the fire now, is it?

He remained obstinately silent.

'My first case, I suppose you'd call it. Start of a meteoric career.'

'Meteors fall. And burn out,' said Pascoe. 'Sir.'

'You're a sharp bugger, Peter,' said Dalziel admiringly. 'Always the quick answer. I bet you were just the same when you were eighteen. Still at school, eh? Not like me. I was a right Constable Plod I tell you. Untried. Untutored. Hardly knew one end of my truncheon from t'other. When I heard that shriek I just froze.'

'Which shriek?' asked Pascoe resignedly.

On cue there came a piercing wail from the dark outside, quickly cut off. He half rose, caught Dalziel's amused eye, and subsided, reaching for the whisky decanter.

'Easy on that stuff,' admonished Dalziel with all the righteousness of a temperance preacher. 'Enjoy your supper, like yon owl. Where was I? Oh aye. I was on night patrol. None of your Panda-cars in those days. You did it all on foot. And I was standing just inside this little alleyway. It was a dark narrow passage running between Shufflebotham's woolmill on the one side and a little terrace of back-to-backs on the other. It's all gone now, all gone. There's a car park there now. A bloody car park!

'Any road, the thing about this alley was, it were a dead end. There was a kind of buttress sticking out of the mill wall, might have been the chimneystack, I'm not sure, but the back-to-backs had been built flush up against it so there was no way through. No way at all.'

He took another long pull at his scotch to help his memory and began to scratch his armpit noisily.

'Listen!' said Pascoe suddenly.

'What?'

'I thought I heard a noise.'

'What kind of noise?'

'Like fingers scrabbling on rough stone,' said Pascoe.

Dalziel removed his hand slowly from his shirt front and regarded Pascoe malevolently.

'It's stopped now,' said Pascoe. 'What were you saying, sir?'

'I was saying about this shriek,' said Dalziel. 'I just froze to the spot. It came floating out of this dark passage. It was as black as the devil's arsehole up there. The mill wall was completely blank and there was just one small window in the gable end of the house. That, if anywhere, was where the shriek came from. Well, I don't know what I'd have done. I might have been standing there yet wondering what to do, only this big hand slapped hard on my shoulder. I nearly shit myself! Then this voice said, "What's to do, Constable Dalziel?" and when I looked round there was my sergeant, doing his rounds.

'I could hardly speak for a moment, he'd given me such a fright. But I didn't need to explain. For just then came another shriek and voices, a man's and a woman's, shouting at each other. "You hang on here," said the sergeant. "I'll see what this is all about." Off he went, leaving me still shaking. And as I looked down that gloomy passageway, I began to remember some local stories about this mill. I hadn't paid much heed to them before. Everywhere that's more than fifty years old had a ghost in them parts. They say Yorkshiremen are hardheaded, but I reckon they've got more superstition to the square inch than a tribe of pygmies. Well, this particular tale was about a mill-girl back in the 1870$. The owner's son had put her in the family way which I dare say was common enough. The owner acted decently enough by his lights. He packed his son off to the other end of the country, gave the girl and her family a bit of cash and said

she could have her job back when the confinement was over."

'Almost a social reformer,' said Pascoe, growing interested despite himself.

'Better than a lot of buggers still in business round here,' said Dalziel sourly. 'To cut a long story short, this lass had her kid premature and it soon died. As soon as she was fit enough to get out of bed, she came back to the mill, climbed through a skylight on to the roof and jumped off. Now all that I could believe. Probably happened all the time.'

'Yes,' said Pascoe. 'I've no doubt that a hundred years ago the air round here was full of falling girls. While in America they were fighting a war to stop the plantation owners screwing their slaves!'

'You'll have to watch that indignation, Peter,' said Dalziel. 'It can give you wind. And no one pays much heed to a preacher when you can't hear his sermons for farts. Where was I, now? Oh yes. This lass. Since that day there'd been a lot of stories about people seeing a girl falling from the roof of this old mill. Tumbling over and over in the air right slowly, most of 'em said. Her clothes filling with air, her hair streaming behind her like a comet's tail. Oh aye, lovely descriptions some of them were. Like the ones we get whenever there's an accident. One for every pair of eyes, and all of 'em perfecdy detailed and perfectly different.'

'So you didn't reckon much to these tales?' said Pascoe.

'Not by daylight,' said Dalziel. 'But standing there in the mouth of that dark passageway at midnight, that was different.'

Pascoe glanced at his watch.

'It's nearly midnight now,' he said in a sepulchral tone.

Dalziel ignored him.

'I was glad when the sergeant stuck his head through that little window and bellowed my name. Though even that gave me a hell of a scare. "Dalziel!" he said. "Take a look up this alleyway. If you can't see anything, come in here." So I had a look. There wasn't anything, just sheer brick walls on three sides with only this one little window. I didn't hang about

but got myself round to the front of the house pretty sharply and went in. There were two people there besides the sergeant. Albert Pocklington, whose house it was, and his missus, Jenny. In those days a good bobby knew everyone on his beat. I said hello, but they didn't do much more than grunt. Mrs Pocklington was about forty. She must have been a bonny lass in her time and she still didn't look too bad. She'd got her blouse off, just draped around her shoulders, and I had a good squint at her big round tits. Well, I was only a lad! I didn't really look at her face till I'd had an eyeful lower down and then I noticed that one side was all splotchy red as though someone had given her a clout. There were no prizes for guessing who. Bert Pocklington was a big solid fellow. He looked like a chimpanzee, only he had a lot less gumption.'

'Hold on," said Pascoe.

'What is it now?' said Dalziel, annoyed that his story had been interrupted.

'I thought I heard something. No, I mean really heard something this time.'

They listened together. The only sound Pascoe could hear was the noise of his own breathing mixed with the pulsing of his own blood, like the distant sough of a receding tide.

'I'm sorry,' he said. 'I really did think . . .'

'That's all right, lad,' said Dalziel with surprising sympathy, 'I know the feeling. Where'd I got to? Albert Pocklington. My sergeant took me aside and put me in the picture. It seems that Pocklington had got a notion in his mind that someone was banging his missus while he was on the night shift. So he'd slipped away from his work at midnight and come home, ready to do a bit of banging on his own account. He wasn't a man to move quietly, so he'd tried for speed instead, flinging open the front door and rushing up the stairs. When he opened the bedroom door, his wife had been standing by the open window naked to the waist, shrieking. Naturally he thought the worst. Who wouldn't? Her story was that she was getting ready for bed when she had this feeling of the

room suddenly becoming very hot and airless and pressing in on her. She'd gone to the window and opened it, and it was like taking a cork out of a bottle, she said. She felt as if she was being sucked out of the window, she said. (With tits like you and a window that small, there wasn't much likelihood of that! I thought.) And at the same time she had seen a shape like a human figure tumbling slowly by the window. Naturally she shrieked. Pocklington came in. She threw herself into his arms. All the welcome she got was a thump on the ear, and that brought on the second bout of shrieking. She was hysterical, trying to tell him what she'd seen, while he just raged around, yelling about what he was going to do to her fancy man.'

He paused for a drink. Pascoe stirred the fire with his foot. Then froze. There it was again! A distant scratching. He had no sense of direction.

The hairs on the back of his neck prickled in the traditional fashion. Clearly Dalziel heard nothing and Pascoe was not yet certain enough to interrupt the fat man again.

'The sergeant was a good copper. He didn't want a man beating up his wife for no reason and he didn't want a hysterical woman starting a ghost scare. They can cause a lot of bother, ghost scares,' added Dalziel, filling his glass once more with the long-suffering expression of a man who is being caused a lot of bother.

'He sorted out Pocklington's suspicions about his wife having a lover first of all. He pushed his shoulders through the window till they got stuck to show how small it was. Then he asked me if anyone could have come out of that passageway without me spotting them. Out of the question, I told him.

'Next he chatted to the wife and got her to admit she'd been feeling a bit under the weather that day, like the 'flu was coming on, and she'd taken a cup of tea heavily spiked with gin as a nightcap. Ten minutes later we left them more or less happy. But as we stood on the pavement outside, the sergeant asked me the question I'd hoped he wouldn't. Why had I stepped into that alley in the first place? I suppose I

could have told him I wanted a pee or a smoke, something like that. But he was a hard man to lie to, that sergeant. Not like the wet-nurses we get nowadays. So after a bit of humming and hawing, I told him I'd seen something, just out of the corner of my eye, as I was walking past. "What sort of thing?" he asked. Like something falling, I said. Something fluttering and falling through the air between the mill wall and the house end.

'He gave me a queer look, that sergeant did. "I tell you what, Dalziel," he said. "When you make out your report, I shouldn't say anything of that. No, I should keep quiet about that. Leave ghosts to them that understands them. You stick to crime." And that's advice I've followed ever since, till this very night, that is!'

He yawned and stretched. There was a distant rather cracked chime. It was, Pascoe realized, the clock in Eliot's study striking midnight.

But it wasn't the only sound.

'There!
Listen,' urged Pascoe, rising slowly to his feet. 'I
can
hear it. A scratching.
Do you
hear it, sir?'

Dalziel cupped one cauliflower ear in his hand.

'By Christ, I think you're right, lad!' he said as if this were the most remote possibility in the world. 'Come on! Let's take a look.'

Pascoe led the way. Once out of the living-room they could hear the noise quite clearly and it took only a moment to locate it in the kitchen.

'Rats?' wondered Pascoe.

Dalziel shook his head.

'Rats gnaw,' he whispered. 'That sounds like something bigger. It's at the back door. It sounds a bit keen to get in."

Indeed it did, thought Pascoe. There was a desperate insistency about the sound. Sometimes it rose to a crescendo, then tailed away as though from exhaustion, only to renew itself with greater fury.

It was as though someone or something was caught in a trap too fast for hope, too horrible for resignation. Pascoe