Good Morning, Midnight (16 page)

“Yes, sir. Though there did seem to be mitigating circumstances.”

“Did there? Such as?”

“Well, it was getting on to closing time,” said Novello very seriously. “And he was worried about his meat pie.”

Pascoe stared at her. She stared back. Then his face cracked in a grin and after a moment she grinned back.

“However,” he resumed, “it would seem that mitigation is unnecessary as, if your digest of the investigation is accurate, nothing of Pal Junior’s accusations against his stepmother or insinuations against Mr Dalziel ever troubled the official record.”

“No, sir. There’s certainly nothing in the file, no signed transcript of the tape and no reference to it, and there was no mention of any of this at the inquest either.”

“No problem then,” said Pascoe briskly. “So here’s what we’re going to do. If you’re agreeable, that is. You’re going to forget you heard this tape. Both times.”

Just a little reminder that the Fat Man didn’t have a monopoly of divine omniscience.

“Which tape?” she asked.

“Don’t jump the gun,” he said. “Before amnesia sets in, I’d be interested to hear your reactions to it. Anything at all.”

She shrugged.

“I’ve met none of these people. I can’t even make an educated guess as to whether there’s anything in what Maciver said. As to why he changed his mind about hurling all these accusations around, well, in a straight fight, Cambridge undergrad versus the Super, I know where my money would be. But how about you, sir? Weren’t you around at the time?”

Pascoe shook his head.

“Sick leave. We established that last night when it became apparent that this latest suicide was a carbon copy of the old one.”

“That’s you off the hook then, sir.”

Pascoe opened a drawer and slid the cassette into it.

“What hook would that be, Detective?” he said briskly.

“Hook, sir?” said Novello, interpreting the signal. “Who said anything about a hook? Shall I take this stuff back down to the store now?”

“No,” said Pascoe. “Stick it in that cupboard there. I’ll pass it on to Mr Ireland later.”

“Mr Ireland?”

“Yes. Once we’re completely satisfied no crime’s been committed, a suicide, copycat or not, becomes Uniformed’s baby.”

“And are we completely satisfied, sir?”

Pascoe hesitated his answer. The trouble was he still didn’t know if his reluctance to say yes was caused by anything more than an objection to the Fat Man steamrollering him off the case.

But he didn’t doubt that in the apophthegms of the wise from Confucius to Rochefoucauld he could find many variations on the theme that men who try to stop steamrollers end up flat. Presumably Pal Maciver Junior too had tasted the sadness of Dalziel’s might. All that passion and hate in his recorded statement, yet none of it had ever got on to the public record.

So what did he do now? He suspected-no, he was certain-that he’d already stepped over the line drawn by Dalziel’s instruction to tidy this up and dump it on Paddy Ireland. There was danger in probing further, but was there any point?

Novello was watching him closely. He got the feeling she was following his thought processes even more closely. He remembered as a teenager climbing up on to the high board at the municipal swimming pool and changing his mind when he realized just how high it was. Then his nervous eye had spotted a couple of girls he knew who’d just come in and were looking up at him. So he’d dived.

Happily he was long past such adolescent needs to prove himself.

He said, “You know what? I think it might be useful to have a look at the scene by daylight.”

She smiled secretly but he saw it. And he recalled that when, after a descent which seemed to go on forever, he’d hit the water in a belly flop that almost stunned him, one of the girls had dived in and helped him to the side.

No use showing off unless you could carry it off.

He said, “It would be useful to have a fresh pair of eyes along…” paused, then went on, “I’ll just see if Sergeant Wield is in,” and reached for his phone.

“Not till later, sir,” said Novello. “I told you he’d got the morning off.”

“So you did,” said Pascoe. “In that case, I suppose you’d better come along, Shirley.”

Already he was feeling ashamed of his pettiness.

“OK,” said Novello. “Shall I drive?”

This was a telling riposte, thought Pascoe as he blew his nose to conceal his alarm. He recalled the one previous time he’d travelled, folded like a foetus, in the front seat of Novello’s Fiat Uno. She’d driven like Jehu on a bad prophet day and his abiding memory was of being far too close both to the road and to God.

Self-preservation overcame political correctness. He said firmly, “No, we’ll go in my car.”

And got that secret thought-reading smile again.

The fog had lain thick on Enscombe village all night but it hadn’t inhibited the dawn chorus, and Detective Sergeant Edgar Wield had been further cheered by the returning memory that he wasn’t due in at work till after lunch. It would have been nice to share a lie-in with his partner, Edwin Digweed, but that was not to be. The Yorkshire Antiquarian Bookdealers Association’s annual symposium was starting at the Golden Fleece Hotel that evening and, as the member closest to the action, Digweed had taken on the job of making sure that everything was ready for the delegates’ arrival.

Observing that Wield’s good cheer seemed to have declined a little over breakfast and putting it down to his own unavoidable absence on his friend’s morning off, he apologized again before he left, adding, “Look, you pass the road end. Why don’t you call in and we’ll have lunch together? My treat.”

“And my pleasure,” said Wield.

In fact his apparent depression of spirits had had nothing to do with Edwin’s absence, but was merely a retrospectively pensive mood provoked by the news on local radio of Palinurus Maciver’s death in Moscow House the previous night.

By midday, with the sun soaring high in an almost cloudless sky, and the fog and the chill of the previous night vanished like a dream, he was in no mood for retrospection, and as he rode his Thunderbird along the narrow road that led out of Eendale, he sang in a voice to make a rook wince, “The flowers that bloom in the spring, Tra la, Breathe promise of merry sunshine.”

Normally his speed of choice would have blown the words back down his throat, but today he was moving at a pace sedate enough, if not to let him enjoy the scent of the flowers as he passed, at least to take in the full beauty of the landscape which in a single night seemed to have shrugged off the debilitations of winter and risen refreshed to garb itself in the clean bright fabrics of spring.

Eventually the road emerged from the steep-sided valley into a flatter, more conventionally pastoral landscape still very attractive in its variety of vernal greens. A couple of miles ahead lay the junction with the main east-west arterial, the fastest way into town for a man in a hurry, which was what Wield usually was as he found himself increasingly reluctant to leave Enscombe village of a morning. Today, however, he turned off to the left about a mile before the arterial junction, entering what to the casual tourist looked like a pleasant minor country road. But this too had once enjoyed the hustle and bustle and self-importance of a major thoroughfare before the road improvers of the sixties discovered a better, more Roman line for the main east-west route.

Those with farms or houses along the old main road had been mightily relieved to learn that the new highway wasn’t going to affect them except by rendering their everyday lives a lot more peaceful. Only the owner of the Golden Fleece, the old coaching inn at Gallow’s Cross, had been dismayed, and rightly so. With the passing trade which had been the Fleece’s life blood for a century and a half now coursing with ever-increasing force two miles to the south, the Fleece had rapidly declined to a run-down country pub with only its incongruous dimensions to remind anyone of the glory days.

Then, just as rumours gathered strength that it was to be demolished completely to make way for an intensive pig farm, it was bought in the eighties by a national hotel chain specializing in establishments that could combine the snobbish attractions of the country house hotel and the corporate attractions of the conference centre plus health and leisure club.

The old coaching inn was completely refurbished and extended to provide all the necessary concomitants of hospitality in the late twentieth century, and though the result might not have satisfied Prince Charles, with its ease of access to the fleshpots of urban Mid-Yorkshire in one direction and the beauties of rural Mid-Yorkshire in the other, it succeeded in satisfying the demands both of those in search of peace and quiet and those intent on expense-account conviviality.

As a coaching inn, the Golden Fleece had naturally had an entrance straight off the road under an archway into its courtyard, but that was impracticable in days when they might be expecting several dozen cars and now you approached along a sweeping driveway through pleasant parkland under whose scattered trees sheep paused in their grazing and lambs in their gambolling as a leather-clad figure rode by, carolling, “We welcome the hope that they bring, Tra-la, Of a summer of roses and wine…”

There were plenty of spaces in the car park but Wield’s eye was caught by a station wagon so long unwashed that its colour was hard to determine. He parked the Thunderbird next to it, dismounted and peered through the grubby window.

The rear seats were covered with a familiar strew of clothing, maps, empty takeaway cartons plus a Spanish onion and a half-full bottle of Highland Park-the famous emergency rations.

Wield was not much given to flights of fancy but for a moment his mind scrabbled for a parallel among the nasty shocks of fact and fiction-Friday’s footprint, Amundsen’s flag fluttering over the Pole, Pearce’s missed penalty in the ’90 World Cup-and found none.

This was Andy Dalziel’s car.

On the other hand, even devils must dine, and there was no rational explanation for the deep sense of foreboding the discovery roused in him.

He set off for the hotel entrance. The car park was discreetly screened from the building complex by a box hedge. As he passed through this he came to a sudden stop. A mock Victorian conservatory had been built on the end of the hotel. Through the glass under a potted palm he saw two heads-one fine-boned, short black hair elegantly coiffured; the other solid as an ancient weathered boulder-leaning close together over a wrought-iron table, like a tableau set up by a nineteenth-century narrative painter working on a canvas entitled The Assignation.

The woman looked in his direction and said something; the big grey head opposite her began to turn, and Wield took a hasty step backwards with the roar of Teutonic cheers and Antarctic winds echoing in his ears.

Back in the car park, he got on his bike and went looking for a space as far from Dalziel’s car as he could get and closer to the path round to the front of the hotel which would keep him out of view of the conservatory.

The cheers and the winds had been replaced by the song he’d been singing all the way from Enscombe, but now he’d moved on to the second verse.

“The flowers that bloom in the spring, Tra la, Have nothing to do with the case…”

Kay Kafka said, “That guy in the biker gear, wasn’t it…?”

“Unless he’s got a twin, which I doubt,” said Dalziel.

“I thought this was a private unofficial meeting, Andy,” said Kay Kafka.

“Me too. Don’t fret, I’ll be having a word. So, things all right with you generally, are they, Kay?”

“They’re fine. No worries. Not till this thing last night.”

“I’ve told you, put that out of your mind. Terrible business, but no reason you should be involved.”

“It looks to me as if Pal wanted to involve me,” she said.

“Aye, you’re right from what you said. But it hasn’t worked. So no problem.”

“I don’t need to make it official then?”

“No point,” he said confidently. “Why complicate what’s simple? As things stand, I doubt Paddy Ireland, that’s the man in charge, will even want to talk to you. No, forget it.”

“I’ll try. But it won’t be easy. He was his father’s son. My stepson. Helen’s brother.”

“He was a nasty twisted scrote.”

“He must have been in great distress to kill himself.”

“Aye, and he wanted to spread it around as much as he could. Like hearing you’ve got leprosy and drowning yourself in the town reservoir. So you forget it and concentrate on them new grandchildren.”

“Stepgrandchildren,” she corrected.

“I doubt they’ll ever see it like that,” he said, emptying his glass. “They don’t know how lucky they are, not yet. Give ’em a couple of years, but, and they’ll know.”

She smiled at him fondly and said, “All this talk of me. How are you, Andy? You still with your friend?”

“Cap? Aye, so to speak.”

“So to speak? That doesn’t sound too positive,” she said, concerned.

“Nay, all I meant was we don’t live together. Not permanent. Like our own space, isn’t that what they say? Any road, she’s away just now.”

“In her own space?”

“Summat like that. She protests.”

“Not too much, I hope?”

“Feels like it sometimes. I used to take the piss out of my lad, Pascoe, ’cos his missus were one of these agitating women. God likes a joke.”

“Because now you’ve got one?”

“Because I’ve got the one. Animal rights, the environment, that stuff. When she says she’ll be away a couple of days but don’t say where, I stop reading the paper in case I see that Sellafield’s been blown up.”

“Your womenfolk are a trouble to you, Andy.”

“Nay, them I think of as mine are worth ten times the trouble,” he said, smiling at her. “How’s that man of thine?”