Dalziel 04 An April Shroud

by Reginald Hill

  Nothing was the answer. He would of course do nothing. But still he wondered, and his hand was actually on the door knob when he heard the voices. They were speaking so low that even with an ear pressed hard against the woodwork, there was no chance of picking out words. But he could make out that there were two voices - a man's and a woman's.

  As carefully as he had approached he retreated from the door. If he had prayed before sleeping he might have said, 'Thank you, Lord, for changing nothing.' But he didn't. He just climbed into bed and fell into the deepest, soundest sleep he had known for months.

  At seven-thirty the following morning he was down at the lakeside examining the scene of Spinx's death by daylight. There had been no rain that night and the water-level had dropped another six inches. Having dispatched the constable left by Cross in search of breakfast, Dalziel peered at the gap left by the broken treads with considerable uninterest. His attitude to physical clues was rather like that of the modern Christian to miracles. They could happen, but probably not just at the moment.

  Nevertheless the possibility could not be ignored and he jumped down into the duck punt to get a duck's eye look at the landing-stage.

  The three broken treads trailed in the water like old fishbones. Carefully Dalziel poked at them with the blade of an antique penknife whose possession by a long-haired youth at a football match would have got him three months. The outermost two treads were soft but reasonably solid; the third was rotten almost right through. This it must have been that triggered things off. If Spinx had come down on this with his full weight, it could well have snapped, sending him plunging forward so that his head cracked against the timber uprights supporting the end of the stage and his body hit the other two treads with sufficient force to smash through them.

  Unconscious from the blow, he would quickly have drowned and floated there, held between the submerged sections of the support baulks, till Dalziel found him.

  That's how it could have happened, thought Dalziel, lighting a cigarette and relaxing in the gently jogging punt. If the post mortem showed death to be due to drowning and the head injury to be consistent with a crack against the upright, that would be that. Another Lake House inquest with a verdict of accidental death. And any journalistic interest thus engendered would mean merely so much free advertising for the restaurant. If it opened.

  The odds against were now enormous. Dalziel was no businessman but it seemed fairly certain to him that unless they opened on time, the outcry from the disappointed (and uncompensated) customers would be so great that any remaining semblance of creditworthiness would be torn to shreds. His own discovery of the missing drink and the disembowelled ovens had probably been the scheme's death blow. Herrie's dollars might have made a difference but he was so obsessively against the venture that it would need another death to prise the money free. If it had been the old man's face that had peered up through the water the previous night, that would have been quite a different kettle of fish! Not all the rotten wood in the world would have bridged the doubts in Dalziel's mind.

  Something clicked close by and he looked up to see Uniff towering above him with a smile on his face and a camera in his hand.

  'What a shot!' he said. 'The great detective at work! What were you thinking of, man? A single-handed trip round the world?'

  'I thought you were short of film,' said Dalziel, stepping up on to the landing-stage.

  'There are some things too good to miss,' said Uniff. 'Say, that could be dangerous.'

  He pointed to the broken treads and Dalziel recalled his late return the previous night. Presumably he had not yet met, anyone who had told him about Spinx.

  ‘It was,' said Dalziel. 'Oh shit!' He was looking at the sleeve of his jacket which was smeared with oil. He traced its source very quickly to the punt. Someone had been trying to clean up the duck gun.

  'Tillotson!' he groaned. 'I'll kill him!'

  ‘If he tries to fire that antique, he'll kill himself,' observed Uniff. 'What were you doing down there, anyway, man?'

  As they walked back to the house, Dalziel filled him in on the discovery of Spinx's body.

  Uniff was incredulous.

  'That little creep? I can't believe it! His kind live for ever.'

  'You didn't like him?' said Dalziel.

  'What? No, I didn't say that. Some of my best friends are insurance creeps. Anyway, I wasn't around last night, not after nine. So it's no use grilling me.'

  His Americanisms were sometimes venerably antique and in his initial surprise at Dalziel's news, he had sounded very like his sister. But the fat detective's mind had seized upon points of other than linguistic interest.

  'I'm not grilling you, Mr Uniff,' he said. 'But I'd be interested to know why you think I might be.'

  'Well, hell, sudden death, the fuzz start asking questions all round. I know, we've had some, remember?'

  'I remember,' said Dalziel. 'Point two, why should nine strike you as being a significant time? There's nothing yet that says Spinx didn't take his bath earlier.'

  'It wasn't meant to be significant,' said Uniff. ‘It was just the time I left, that's all.'

  The uniformed constable came out of the front door as they reached it. He had a half-eaten bacon sandwich in his saluting hand and treated Dalziel to a distant and fatty wave.

  'Which brings us to where you went last night, Mr Uniff,' said Dalziel heavily.

  Uniff laughed as he ushered Dalziel into the house ahead of him.

  'Now you are grilling me,' said Uniff.

  The door which led to the kitchen opened at the other end of the hallway and Mavis appeared.

  'OK,' said Uniff. if that's how it's gotta be, come on up to my pad. I got the equipment there.'

  He steered Dalziel up the stairs at a speed which left him short of breath by the time they reached the first landing. Looking back, he saw Mavis standing at the foot of the stairs watching their ascent with the impassive intensity of a totem mask.

  The room Uniff led him to was huge. The design of the faded and torn wallpaper suggested it had once been a nursery, though no other evidence survived. There were no broken rocking-horses, no disfigured Teddy-bears, just a huge table littered with paper and film equipment, and at the farthermost end of the room surrounded by spot lamps a rostrum camera set-up.

  'Here we are,' said Uniff proudly. 'What do you think, man?'

  'They must have had bloody huge families in them days,' said Dalziel.

  'What? Oh, yeah. It was probably those long winter nights when the magic lantern broke down.'

  Uniff wandered across to the camera, turned one of the lamps so that it pointed full in his face and switched it on.

  'OK, captain. But I tell you again, I don't know nothing.'

  'This your film then?' asked Dalziel peering without comprehension at a huge sheet of card pinned to the wall. On it were pasted a series of drawings, about fifty in all, like a strip cartoon except that the sequence of events escaped Dalziel.

  'I thought you'd never ask,' said Uniff, switching off his light. 'Yeah, that's my story board. I've got some rushes here. You want to see them?'

  Like all obsessives, he could not doubt the answer but quickly drew down the black-out blinds and set the projector rolling. On the screen appeared the letter O. It turned into a man's head. A stone age club appeared and hammered down on the skull. The mouth opened and out came a strip cartoon balloon containing the letter O which in its turn became a breast. A hand caressed it. The response again was O; and in sequence every part of the human body was represented by the letter, then assaulted or stimulated in some fashion more or less appropriate, always with the same response. The animation was clever, often wittily obscene, though Dalziel doubted if in these blatant days it was actionable.

  ‘It's about language,' explained Uniff. 'Mave does the animations. Not bad, eh? No sound yet. That's a problem. What do you think? Do we need those O's vocalized?'

  The film ran on. Eventually a stone age doctor present
ed his stone age patient with a bill. The mouth rounded to an O, the eyes to two more, then they all expanded and exploded into a torrent of letters.

  'How'd you like that?' asked Uniff as the film ran to an end. 'Commerce is the mother of language. Not love, hate, religion, sex. But money.'

  'Well,' said Dalziel. ‘It's not very long is it?'

  'Hell, man, that's just the opening sequence. Next we go on to a historical survey. The letters and words are the characters, you dig? All languages, all literatures. It's very funny, Mave's done marvels. All the time there's a struggle between the different functions of language. Finally figures start coming in until at the end we get nuclear physics formulae dominating, then the whole thing goes bang and we're back to O.'

  'Interesting,' said Dalziel. 'I like a good cartoon. Cheaper to make than a real film, I suppose?'

  He was just fishing for some indication of where the finance for the project came from, but Uniff pulled up the blinds angrily, seized a large envelope from a shelf and spilled a dozen or more glossy half-plate prints into Dalziel's lap.

  'Those more in your line, Superintendent?'

  Dalziel studied them gravely. He was not one of those who found the vagina in close-up a particularly appealing sight, not even when its owner appeared to have a traffic no entry sign tattooed on the inner thigh.

  'In a way,' he said. 'Professionally speaking.'

  Uniff retrieved the photographs hastily and returned them to their envelope. His anger had quickly vanished.

  'They're harmless,' he said. 'I was just showing them to you, not asking you to buy them.'

  'No need to get legalistic, Mr Uniff,' said Dalziel. 'Though you ought to know that under the Obscene Publication Acts, publication (that is, simply showing someone your dirty pictures) is an offence, whether done for gain or not. But you're in luck. I doubt if anything you've got here is liable to deprave or corrupt me. So let's forget I ever saw them, shall we, and try to remember where you went last night.'

  According to Uniff he had simply gone into Orburn for a drink and stayed on after hours as a guest of the landlord. He coyly refused to give the name of the pub on the grounds that he didn't want to risk spoiling a good drinking place. Dalziel found this quite reasonable and, in any case, he had no real authority for, or purpose in, questioning the man, so he didn't press matters.

  He went downstairs again and as he reached the hallway, the door to the servants' quarters opened and Arkwright emerged. Dalziel had never seen a pale Negro before and the sight touched him.

  'Morning, Mr Arkwright,' said Dalziel with the jovial sympathy of one hard-drinking man for another. 'How are you feeling?'

  'Terrible,' said Arkwright. 'Listen. I'm very sorry about all this, I don't know what happened.'

  'Something you ate I should think,' said Dalziel, but observing that the man seemed genuinely distressed at what had passed he put on his avuncular air and added, 'Think nowt of it. They're all silly buggers here, you wouldn't be noticed.'

  A little comforted by this, Arkwright let himself be led to coffee which comforted him even more.

  'Penitent left, I suppose?'

  'Yes, I think so.'

  'Shithead,' said Arkwright. 'I hate that bloody man. He always wants me on a job with him. I'm his liberal credential.'

  'I think he'll be after a divorce this morning,' said Dalziel.

  Arkwright laughed, regretted it, suddenly sat upright as though at a memory returned and said, 'You put me to bed? Whose bed was I in?'

  'Why?' asked Dalziel. 'Have you spewed or something?'

  'No. It's just, I remember now, some time in the night, I was woken up. Some guy was pulling at the blankets and saying, "Annie, Annie." So I sat up and said, "Sir, you are mistaken," and this guy shrieked like he was wetting his pants and ran.'

  Dalziel thought about it for a moment, then as the image of Arkwright's coal black face emerging from the blankets sharpened in his mind he began to laugh. After a while with great care, Arkwright began to laugh too.

  'This man,' said Dalziel finally, wiping his eyes with the khaki awning he used as a handkerchief. 'Did you recognize him? Was he one of the men you met yesterday afternoon?'

  'I can't say,' said Arkwright. 'Might be. But it was dark and I was still very drunk. It must have been pretty early. He sounded urgent. I suppose I was lucky he didn't just climb in and get on with it.'

  Dalziel smiled and nodded. The obvious interpretation of the intrusion would do for Arkwright, but he was by no means sure that the intruder's purpose had been sexual.

  But the more interesting question was, who in this house had not heard last night of the discovered theft and Annie Greave's disappearance?

  13

  An Intimate Deodorant

  Cross arrived shortly before ten bearing with him a preliminary autopsy report which indicated that Spinx had died from drowning and that the injury on his head was consistent with his having struck the wooden support as he fell. With grim amusement Dalziel recognized in Cross the mixture of relief and disappointment an over-worked, middle-aged but still ambitious detective sergeant ought to feel.

  'Never mind, lad,' he said. 'Perhaps there'll be an outbreak of double parking in the town square. No sign of Mrs Greave?'

  'No, sir. Nor of Papworth either. Do you reckon they might have gone off together?'

  'Without his clothes?' said Dalziel. 'I doubt it. And I can't see 'em as the great lovers somehow. Where'd they go anyway? He'd be as out of place in the middle of Liverpool as she was in the country.'

  'That's what I thought,' said Cross. 'Makes you wonder how they met.'

  'It does that,' agreed Dalziel who had been wondering this same thing for two days.

  'I wonder if Mrs Fielding could help us there,' said Cross diffidently. 'She'd be the one who hired her, I suppose. What do you think, sir, knowing her as you do?'

  Dalziel shot him a sharp glance. Christ! he thought. Could the rustic tom-toms work this quick? What did they do round here? Hide seismographs in the mattress?

  'Why not ask her, Sergeant,' he said. 'And less of the us. I'm on holiday, remember?'

  'Yes, sir,' said Cross.

  Dalziel left him and strolled out of the room trying to look like a man whose only care in the world was whether to have one or two double scotches before lunch.

  He met Bonnie in the hallway.

  'Can we have a word together, Andy?' she asked. She looked very attractive in pea-green slacks and a tight silk blouse which would have gone seven times round Louisa and left enough to blow your nose on.

  'Sergeant Cross is in there,' said Dalziel with a jerk of his head. 'I think his need's greater than mine.'

  Again his rudeness only seemed to amuse her.

  'I didn't realize you were a once-a-month man,' she said. 'Later then. Say in an hour? In my room.'

  She brushed by him. The brief contact disturbed him more than he would have thought possible.

  He wandered into the back of the house and looked in Papworth's room. Still empty, but now it bore signs of having been searched. Cross obviously didn't mind leaving traces of his passage.

  Dalziel mused on Cross as he continued his stroll. He looked a good competent man, perhaps a bit long in the tooth for a sergeant but not yet hopeless of promotion. Perhaps he himself might put in a word . . .

  Christalmighty! he suddenly laughed at himself. Lord sodding Dalziel dispensing bounty to the plebs! No. Cross could find another fairy godmother. Middle-aged superintendents needed belated christening gifts just as much as sergeants, though the one Dalziel wanted most of all just now had in fact been bountifully bestowed all those grey years ago and was only now beginning to run short.

  Clarity of purpose.

  Out in the yard he lit a cigarette and walked slowly past the so-called Banqueting Hall. It felt derelict. A white elephant, a folly. Unless someone coughed up some cash. He thought of his own deposit account. Not insubstantial. He hardly gave it a thought till he wanted cash for someth
ing special. Like the set of crystal decanters and glasses he'd given Pascoe and Ellie. Looking after your own interests she'd mocked. But she'd been pleased. So she should have been too, it cost a bloody fortune even with the big discount his cash in hand and his bonny blue eyes got him. Still, there was plenty left. Last night as he lay on Bonnie's bed, he'd even thought about suggesting an investment, but had put it off. At that moment it might have looked a bit like tucking a fiver behind the clock. Besides there was still the business of the missing gear to resolve. Risking your money was one thing, chucking it away quite another. And after Bertie's revelation ... no, she'd have to find another fool.

  The sound of a vehicle approaching interrupted his thoughts. He reached the end of the hall, stepped out and was almost knocked down by a large truck which rattled past him into the cobbled yard. He turned to harangue the driver, and saw the legend on the opening door.Gibb and Fowler, Builders.

  Little Mr Gibb jumped out and the men on the back began to disembark.

  'Hang around, lads. Have a smoke till I see what's what,' commanded Gibb.

  He looked around as if in search of somebody and showed his teeth in a gothic smile when he spotted Dalziel.

  'Hello there,' he said. 'You were right then.'

  'Was I?' said Dalziel. 'What about?'

  'Me being back on the job sooner than I expected. You drop into my place before you go. There's a big bottle there for my friends.'

  He winked knowingly. Dalziel looked at him bewildered. Could he actually have spoken his thoughts about putting money into the venture last night? And if he had, could Bonnie have taken him seriously after what happened?

  He didn't believe it. Anyway, one thing was clear. Gibb wasn't going to start work just on a promise.

  'Mr Gibb!' a voice called imperiously.

  They turned. Standing in the doorway of the main house was Hereward Fielding.

  'Would you step inside for a moment, please.'

  'Right. See you around,' said Gibb happily to Dalziel.

  So, thought Dalziel. Mystery solved. But a bigger one put in its place. What had produced this complete turnabout by the old man?