Deadheads (27 page)

His generous reassurance did not produce the desired calming effect.

'You fat bastard,' she said. 'You haven't changed, have you? They all said you were a nasty bit of work then, and you still are now. I'll leave you to finish this muck. Next time you take a lady out, probably in another fifty years, try to buy her a decent bottle of wine instead of five gallons of this sludge, will you? Give my regards to Yorkshire.'

She rose as she spoke, almost knocking her chair over, turned and strode towards the door. She was fairly steady, Dalziel noted approvingly. And he admired her steadiness too in sticking to her story. In ninety per cent of cases, whatever threats, promises or inducements had been offered, the criminal who coughed was a fool.

Not that he could think of Penny Highsmith as a criminal, he thought, as her fetchingly rounded rear elevation vanished through the door.

The waiter arrived with the coffee and whisky.

'Bill,' said Dalziel tersely.

He downed the Scotch in one, studied the bill which the prescient waiter had quickly prepared as the quarrel developed, approved it, paid it and stood up.

Plucking Penny's handbag from the back of the chair where she'd hung it on arrival, he made for the door. The pavement was empty, but he stood with the bag held in the air which a passing taxi took to be a signal.

As it stopped, Penny emerged from a nearby shop doorway.

Dalziel got into the taxi, leaving the door open. After a moment, the woman joined him. He gave her address.

'Can I have my bag, please?' she said.

He handed it over and she opened it and began to look through her purse.

'It's all right. I paid out of my own pocket,' he said.

'Just checking,' she said icily.

'Look,' he said. 'I'm sorry. You got the wrong end of the stick.'

'In your case, I imagine both ends are dirty.'

They finished the journey in silence. At the door of the block of flats, Penny turned her key in the lock and tried to slip inside alone, but Dalziel's shoulder was too quick.

'Where the hell do you think you're going?' she demanded.

'Listen,' he said, his great slab of a face set with earnestness, as if a second-rate Renaissance sculptor, stuck with an angry Ajax, had smoothed down its features a bit in an effort to sell it as a St Peter in prayer. 'I just wanted to say, for me it's been a grand night, one of the best I've had in a long while. Grand. I mean that. Sincerely. Thank you.'

She regarded him with astonishment modulating to simple puzzlement.

'What are you after?' she asked. 'I mean, really?'

'Friendship,' said Dalziel promptly. 'Look, hadn't I better step inside and just check for muggers? These cockneys are all at it.'

She shook her head and laughed. He took this as an invitation, put on an alert, constabulary expression and stepped forward.

'Seems all right here,' he said. 'I'll just check the other rooms.'

With the aggressive confidence of one who has no expectation whatsoever of trouble, he opened the bedroom door. The man standing just inside struck him firmly and accurately on the nose, crashing him back against the wall. Penny screamed as he shoulder-charged her to the ground, then his footsteps were receding down the stairs.

'Jesus Christ!' groaned Dalziel, rubbing his watering eyes. They cleared enough for him to see Penelope who was struggling to her knees. The fall had dislodged her crowning glory of lustrous black curls and beneath the wig appeared a crop of tightly crushed locks, grey almost to whiteness.

'Are you all right,' asked Dalziel.

'No better for having you here,' she answered. 'God, your nose is a mess!'

He helped her up and together they went round the flat. The intruder proved to have been a neat burglar if burglar he was. He had clearly made an attempt to leave things as he found them and Penny had to admit that she might well have never noticed he'd been there.

'What the hell was he after?' she asked, having ascertained there was nothing missing.

'God knows,' said Dalziel from the bathroom where he was bathing his nose.

'What do you think I should do?' asked Penny. 'Call the police?'

'I am the police, remember?' said Dalziel, himself remembering he had sent a message saying he had a bilious attack to excuse his absence from the closing dinner. 'First thing I'd do is get your lock changed. That thing wouldn't stop a backward parrot.'

'You're bloody cool, I must say,' she protested. 'I've been burgled, and is this the best you can do?'

'You've seen nowt yet,' said Dalziel, removing his jacket and tie and sitting down on a sofa.

'What the hell do you think you're doing?' she asked.

He looked at her in surprise.

'You don't think I'd let you stop here by yourself tonight?' he said in a pained voice.

For a second she thought of getting angry again. Then with a sigh she removed her black wig which she had quickly rearranged and ran her fingers through her whitening hair. She aged fifteen years in a second.

'My top teeth come out too,' she said.

'Grand,' he said. 'I was getting worried I might be too old for you. Me, apart from my nose, I've got nowt that's detachable, I'm afraid.'

Now she smiled knowingly.

'We'll have to see about that,' she said.

They had Scotch, then they went to bed, and then they sat up in bed and had some more Scotch.

'Wasn't there some story, one of those old myths, where some god used to come to earth in various forms to have a bit of fun with the girls?' said Penny.

'Seems a sensible sort of thing to do,' observed Dalziel.

'Once he came as a swan, and once he came as a shower of rain, then another time he came as a bull.'

'How'd he manage it as a shower of rain?'

'I don't know. But I've a damn good idea how he managed it as a bull!'

Dalziel smirked modestly as though at a royal accolade.

'You should have had me that time fifteen years back,' he said. 'I've slowed down a lot.'

'Haven't we all?'

'Not you,' he said. 'Must be living down here that's done it. It's all too fast for me.'

'Like Yorkshire was too slow for me,' she said. 'I really missed London, I admit it. And the funny thing was, it didn't get any better as time went by. I paid visits, mind you. I mean, it's only a couple of hours or so on the train. But it wasn't the same. I had to get back.'

'Is that why you decided to sell up?'

'That's right.'

'How did Patrick react?'

'Patrick? He didn't say much. He was never one for big dramatic scenes. But I could see he wasn't too happy. But it was my life too, and there's only one life apiece, isn't there? He'd just finished his "O" levels, it was a good time to move. And another couple of years and he'd be taking off by himself anyway. So I went ahead with the sale.'

'And Patrick!'

'He went ahead with his life as if there wasn't any question of leaving,' said Penny. 'God, that boy! He could be infuriating, he'd always been like this; anything happening or about to happen that he didn't care for, he just ignored it. I remember he came home about that time and told me he'd been discussing things with his teachers and he was going to take up accountancy. Just like that. I said he could do that just as easily in London as Yorkshire, but he didn't seem to hear me. I couldn't even see why he wanted to do accountancy. I mean, he was all right at maths, but not great. Whereas for biology, and in particular anything to do with plants, he always got top marks. He even won prizes. But no, it had to be accountancy.'

'Perhaps it was because he admired his great-uncle so much,' said Dalziel.

'I don't remember telling you Uncle Eddie was an accountant,' said Penny, frowning.

'I bet you don't remember half of what's been said since we got under these sheets,' laughed Dalziel. 'What stopped you from selling up in the end?'

'I recall telling you
that
,' said Penny. 'You're not only a nosey sod, you're an absent-minded one too.'

'Oh aye. The poor bugger died. Accident, was it?' said Dalziel, whose last telephone conversation with Pascoe had given him full details of the death.

'In a way. He got poisoned, something he ate,' said Penny. 'Some insecticide hadn't got washed off, or something.'

'And didn't you get anyone else interested in buying?' asked Dalziel.

'No. I sort of lost heart, I suppose,' she said. 'I took it off the market. It struck me that perhaps I really ought to consider Patrick's feelings a bit more. I mean, the house was just a white elephant to me, but clearly not to him.'

She spoke almost defiantly.

'So what did you do!' asked Dalziel, though he knew full well.

'I had a talk with him. I told him that we'd stay on at Rosemont for the time being, but as soon as he reached his majority, I was off back to London and he could make his own mind up whether he wanted, or indeed could afford, Rosemont. I was thinking of twenty-one when I said it, but the age of majority was lowered not long after to eighteen, and Patrick seemed determined that should be the decision date. It came. He wanted to stay on by himself, he said. I said, If that's what you want.'

Dalziel whistled and said, 'You must've thought a lot, or very little, of the lad to let him get stuck with a bloody great house like that when he was still only eighteen and not properly earning!'

'Oh yes, I know it seems odd,' said Penny. 'But Patrick . . . well, you've got to meet him to know what I mean. When he wants something, he just sits quietly there till he gets it. He always did, from a baby. Things weren't quite as bad as they seem, mind. Aunt Flo had left me pretty well heeled. After I'd had Rosemont valued and added that to all the other assets, then divided by two, Patrick got a few thousand on top of the house and I got enough to buy the lease on this place and keep me comfortable, at least until they invented inflation. I'll probably start spending capital in the end. I made it quite clear to Patrick that this deal ended his expectations from me. In fact, whatever little there's left when I go will go to my grandchildren when they're twenty-one. But I can't see it being very much!'

'Well, you can't take it with you,' said Dalziel. 'You said he changed his name, your lad.'

'No I didn't!' said Penny, sitting upright. 'What the hell is this, Andy Dalziel?'

'What's what?' asked Dalziel, looking puzzled. 'You said before that your lad's name was Aldermann now. I can hear you saying it.'

He spoke with such authority that the woman's doubts were momentarily assuaged, but he guessed that he had gone as far as he dared without finally convincing her that his motives for the evening were interrogative rather than romantic.

Besides the sight of those still splendidly firm breasts pendant above his reclining head was enough to blunt even the sharp spur of constabulary duty.

He reached up and drew her down towards him.

'This Greek god fellow,' he said. 'What did he try his hand at after the bull?'

PART FOUR

And in the midst of this wide quietness

A rosy sanctuary I will dress

With the wreath'd trellis of a working brain . . .

K
EATS:
Ode to Psyche

1

HAPPINESS

(Hybrid tea. Brilliant crimson blooms on long sturdy stems, perfect for developing under cover.)

Daphne Aldermann rose early on Saturday morning with a feeling that this was a day of important decision.

Since her talk with Ellie she had seemed to spend every waking moment analysing the state of her marriage. Oddly, all previous attempts at self-understanding now appeared vague, ineffectual, and delusory, as if her education, her upbringing, and her whole genetic inheritance had been aimed at misting her view of reality. In a way, it was true. The surface was far from all, but a well-ordered surface certainly compensated for a lot. Beneath it she had not felt particularly unhappy, or wildly neglected, or desperately unfulfilled. And the knowledge that she lived a life which must make many people envious had helped to make her believe that most of its suspected inadequacies were to be traced to her own shallowness. Now something had changed, or at least come to fruition. Perhaps Ellie Pascoe's openness, her frank discontents, her admitted sense of ambiguity in relation to her own marital role, and her saving humour when she seemed to be getting too near to that awful earnest greyness which the left wear as proudly as the right do their blacks and browns, had encouraged the reaction, but it hadn't caused it. She had merely been living through a sort of extended adolescence and at last she'd grown up.

Diana was spending the morning with a friend. Daphne was assiduous in making sure that Rosemont's isolation didn't mean her daughter's too, and she'd driven the little girl to the friend's house shortly after nine. Patrick had rung briefly the previous evening to say he'd be home mid-morning. He had sounded strange, highly charged with some emotion unidentifiable at the end of a very crackly line. The police had also rung and she'd arranged for them to come at midday.

Now she sat and drank a coffee and waited for her husband to return.

When he did, there was going to be open speaking. How open, she was not sure. She had not inherited her High Anglican father's love of confession, but she believed herself willing to reveal the truth of her brief relationship with Dick Elgood if that seemed necessary to shock Patrick into a retaliatory openness. The time for mysteries was past. Patrick had to admit her into his mind if they were to have a future together.

With these and similar rock-hard resolutions she sat and passed the time till on the stroke of eleven she heard the front door open. Instantly the rock began to crumble, and suddenly the thin surface of her life seemed quite strong and certainly rigid enough to carry her not unhappily to the grave.