Good Morning, Midnight (50 page)

“By all means. Why don’t you walk out to the car with me?” said Waverley.

He said goodbye to Miss Mac and Hat. Pascoe noticed that though the birds were unfazed by Waverley’s proximity, they didn’t seem to treat him with the same easy familiarity they displayed to Hat, but that might only have been down to the youngster’s energetic way with a loaf of bread.

As they walked down the garden path together, Waverley said, “So, how can I help you, Mr Pascoe?”

“By telling me the truth,” said Pascoe.

Waverley made no effort to look puzzled. He walked on in silence as if considering his reply, then shook his head.

“No, Mr Pascoe, you’ve got it wrong. That is not how I can help you. In fact that would be quite the reverse of helping you.”

Pascoe said, “I think I should be the judge of that.”

A rather sad little smile touched Waverley’s lips.

“Mr Pascoe, all the portents are good for you, all the smart money is saying you will go far. According to your confidential file, which of course doesn’t exist, you have most of the right qualities. You are clever, perceptive, sensitive, discreet, articulate; you have a natural authority but you are not a bully; you are willing to listen to the opinions of others but you are not afraid to make hard decisions. And you do not make the same mistake twice. But there are some mistakes it is fatal to make even once. If you examine the credentials of all those who have climbed the slippery pole before you, you will find one thing they have on top of all the qualities I have just listed. They are able to recognize there are things they should not be the judge of. This is one of them. It is unnecessary for you and it would be unhelpful for you to be told the truth. I have a telephone number you can ring to receive confirmation of this, but in the greater scheme of things it would be marked down as a mistake for you to have found it necessary to make such a call. So let us part friends, me to resume the even tenor of my retirement, you to continue along the busy highway of crime investigation. I’m sure there is work enough there to occupy all the livelong day.”

They had reached the Jaguar. He opened the door and slipped in behind the wheel, put his key into the ignition, looked up at Pascoe, and smiled.

Good exit, thought Pascoe. Silence. I watch him go. The Jag disappears down the lane. I shake my head as if bringing myself back to the real world then turn back to the cottage. The curtain falls. Tumultuous applause.

He leaned down to the open window and said, “You’re quite right. I have a huge backlog of work and new things drop on my desk every day. I have to make decisions about them, which I’m not afraid to do, though, as you say, I’m always happy to listen to the opinions of others before I do so. What, for example, would be your opinion about a case like this one that’s just come to my notice? It involves a woman of about sixty who suffers from multiple sclerosis. Happily at the moment she seems to be enjoying a period of remission, but when her symptoms become too troublesome, she attempts to alleviate them by smoking marijuana. Now I am of course aware that the law relating to the use of marijuana has been relaxed slightly, and attitudes have relaxed even more. But according to my information, this woman grows the stuff herself, and possibly in quantities in excess of what might be needed for personal use.”

He paused and raised an enquiring eyebrow at Waverley, who was sitting very still with his fingers still gripping the ignition key.

“So what is the nature of your problem, Chief Inspector?” he asked.

“How do I proceed? Do I summon a team to search this woman’s house and dig up her garden? Do I have her brought in for questioning? Do I charge her with possession, cultivation, and possibly distribution? She lives in what some people might regard as rather eccentric conditions involving wild birds, some of which may be protected species. Do I involve the social services? Do I, when her case comes up, have a quiet word with the magistrate and suggest that an official psychological examination and report might be useful? Will the RSPCA or the RSPB wish to investigate? And what steps should I take to protect the woman’s property from the intrusive interest of the popular press? I’d be interested in your opinion, Mr Waverley.”

Now the man’s eyes were filled with coldness which in a real VAT investigator would have had Pascoe burning all his financial records.

“You could find it in you to do all this to a woman whose only crimes are that she is ill and she values her privacy?”

“It would be a hard decision to make, but from what you just told me, not making it could be seen as a sign of weakness which might affect my long-term prospects.”

Waverley said, “I don’t believe you could do that, Mr Pascoe.”

“In that case, goodbye, Mr Waverley.”

“But it’s not a risk I am willing to take. Would you care to join me?”

He opened the passenger door. Pascoe got in. There was an opulent smell of leather. They must have a good pension scheme, these funny buggers, thought Pascoe. Perhaps when they offed anyone, they inherited their benefits.

Waverley said in a businesslike tone, “I shall speak to you as briefly as I can. I will not be interrupted and I shall not answer questions. There will be no further interviews after this, and of course no record.”

Pascoe switched on the mini cassette recorder in his pocket and said, “Agreed. In your own time, Mr Waverley.”

The world is a botched palimpsest, Mr Pascoe. From time to time attempts are made to obliterate what has been written before and inscribe something completely new. But the ur-writing always shows through and there we may read two inerasable though apparently contradictory truths. One is the economic imperative, the other is the holiness of the heart’s affections.

The latter we may see evidenced by the apparently aberrant behaviour of myself in regard to Miss Lavinia Maciver, or of your Mr Dalziel in regard to Mrs Kay Maciver, later Kafka.

The former at all levels drove the takeover of Maciver’s by Ashur-Proffitt.

To the world it seemed simply another step in the process of commercial globalization, or in the Thatcherite sell-off and sell-out of British industry, depending how one regarded such things. In fact it was, as I believe you understand now, merely a small movement in the constantly changing pattern of that global black economy which unifies the world despite all the temporal surface shifts of elections, revolutions, and all other forms of political change.

This gap between appearance and reality becomes more evident if I point out that, at a time when the thaumaturgic word in the corridors of Westminster was privatization, this takeover was in fact a sort of covert nationalization. What I mean is, the activities and the security of what was now known familiarly as Ash-Mac’s became, albeit sub rosa, the responsibility of certain people in Whitehall and Westminster with a watching brief accorded to some others in Washington DC.

I am sure you have worked this out. It won’t have been difficult. Rumours always abound. But the government-any government-has any amount of machinery dedicated to spreading other rumours, counter rumours, more interesting rumours.

What became a matter of concern was the subsequent behaviour of Palinurus Maciver Senior, the former owner of the firm, now, as they thought, safely sidelined into a meaningless advisory directorship. When a man of his standing begins to make accusations of sanction busting and other forms of illegal trading, eventually people will start taking notice. And if he could produce hard evidence to back up his claims, then we would have a scandal on our hands.

And there are always plenty of people in the agencies of government, both public and covert, who will be delighted to advance themselves and their causes on the back of a scandal.

The American management at Ash-Mac’s assured us the matter was under control. Nevertheless my masters, who have a view of good old American know-how only matched in its scepticism by the American view of British savoir-faire, despatched me to Yorkshire to get an unbiased view of the state of play.

The cover I used was a favourite one of mine, that of a Value Added Tax Investigator. It goes deep. You will find a detailed CV of Laurence Waverley in the Customs and Excise personnel records. And it is a job which attracts such natural suspicion that no one imagines I might be something worse. In this case, as I was ostensibly looking into possible VAT irregularities at Ash-Mac’s, it meant I could present myself to Maciver in a very favourable light under the pretext of wanting to compare the record-keeping systems presently in operation with those used before the takeover. Once he got the message that I wasn’t happy with the new regime, he was putty in my hands, as they say. Soon he was sharing with me his own concerns about the firm, and it was from his own mouth that I discovered he was employing the services of Jake Gallipot in his efforts to get hold of the hard evidence he desired.

My investigation of Gallipot revealed a ruthless, ingenious and not untalented man with a deep vein of venality and a very dodgy past. A combination of threat and bribery soon had him on our side, but Maciver remained a nuisance. Not a great one. He had obviously been completely isolated from legitimate access to all sensitive areas in Ash-Mac’s, which was why he needed to employ Gallipot. So it seemed the best he could now do was kick up a fuss with no supporting evidence and it would be fairly easy to have him publicly ridiculed as just another bad loser who couldn’t come to terms with his loss of power. My recommendation was to take all necessary steps to undermine his credibility and let things take their course.

It was his relationship with his wife that altered things, radically. His growing suspicions about the firm had caused a coldness between himself and Kay. From the start he warned Gallipot that she must be kept in the dark. She was still an employee of Ash-Mac’s, and her relationship with Tony Kafka was close. I suspect that in those dark moods which will always overtake an older man with a young wife, Maciver had sometimes asked himself to what extent their romance and marriage had been aimed at facilitating the takeover. In addition, Gallipot during the course of his investigations had visited the Golden Fleece Hotel where Ash-Mac’s had a suite on permanent reserve for distinguished visitors. His aim was to get a look at the registration book to discover who these VIPs were. He was successful in this, but the chambermaid whom he suborned also let drop the information that Mrs Maciver had on at least two occasions to her knowledge used the suite for sexual assignations. She had no names but they were in her words, as Gallipot recorded them, “young fellows, you know the type, think they’re the bee’s knees, but by the time she’d done with them, they’d lost their sting, know what I mean? Chewed ’em up and spat ’em out, she did!”

But the sexual predilections of Mrs Maciver seemed to me irrelevant to my work. Indeed, if as Gallipot believed, Maciver too had his suspicions about her, then that just gave him something else to distract his mind. A cuckold who couldn’t come to terms with being a nobody, the more noise he made, the more absurd he would look.

So one day in March I started packing my bags, thinking my task here was done. Then the phone rang in my hotel bedroom.

It was Gallipot asking me to call round at Moscow House. His form of words was studiedly casual, but I read the urgency underneath.

I was there in five minutes.

I found Gallipot in the lounge with Kay. She was in a semi-catatonic state, sitting bolt upright, pale as death. Looking utterly beautiful. Yes, that struck me very forcibly. Tragedy often destroys female beauty. Not in her case. Quite the opposite, she seemed made for grief.

Upstairs in the study I found Maciver. He was dead with a deep wound on the top of his head. On the floor close by was a bloodstained ice axe, the one which you will recall seeing mounted on the wall alongside the portrait of Mr Maciver in outdoor mode.

There was a letter on the desk. I read it.

It was from his son and it accused Kay of attempting to seduce him during a recent visit home, an attempt which was the culmination of a whole series of incidents of sexual harassment ever since his stepmother had come into the house.

The sequence of events seems to have been that Maciver was returning from London where he had been attempting to interest a newspaper in his campaign. Their response had been cautious. They get this kind of thing all the time and they aren’t interested in committing time, money or personnel unless there’s some real evidence there’s something in it for them.

But Maciver, ready to take any interest as encouragement, was much enthused, and he’d rung Gallipot on his way back to fill him in and demand a progress report. Gallipot, wanting to get a fuller picture of just what the paper had promised, arranged to call at Moscow House for a consultation. In the meantime-we pieced this together later-Maciver got home, read the letter, and confronted his wife with its contents. She denied it, blaming the son. Maciver, his mind already dark with suspicion, did not know what to believe. In any case, there was no comfort to be found in any version of the truth. But one thing he was certain of. He wasn’t going to let Kay out of the country with his daughter. They were due to fly out from Manchester the following morning. Maciver told her the trip was off. Kay protested. Maciver got angry, and I do not doubt his anger made him talk as if absolutely persuaded that his wife was totally to blame for the situation. He told her that she should go to America herself, that he didn’t care if she never came back, and that in any event he didn’t want her anywhere near his family, and in particular Helen, ever again.

For this and for what happened next we have only Kay’s account. She said that when she reacted strongly to this threat-she seems to have been genuinely, indeed almost obsessively, attached to the girl-he became physical and tried to manhandle her out of the room, perhaps intending to throw her right out of the house.