Wield’s face didn’t show much, but his words made it clear he was starting to feel annoyed.
‘You’re admitting that you discovered a crime and, instead of ringing it in and getting a proper investigation under way, you wasted time poking around, disturbing the ground and probably making sure anything you did find will get tagged as inadmissible in court?’
‘No, Sarge. Well, yes, in a way. But not really.’
‘We’ll be into not-as-such land just now,’ said Dalziel. ‘I’m a fair man, young Bowler, and I’ll not see someone hanged without giving him a chance for an explanation, so why don’t you have a stab at one while I tie this knot?’
‘The thing is, there isn’t a crime, sir. I mean, there’s a crime, but there isn’t a complaint. Rye, Miss Pomona, says she doesn’t want to pursue it.’
Now all was clear to Wield. The love-sick lad’s investigation had to be unofficial because officially there was nothing to investigate. He’d come to the Bull in search of a sympathetic ear, and while the sergeant felt faintly flattered that he’d been the sympathetic ear that Hat had come in search of, he wondered what it was the boy had expected him to do. Nothing, possibly. Maybe the sympathy would have been enough.
Dalziel said, ‘Well, God’s jocks, now I’ve heard it all. Wasting police time on a load of nowt …’
‘I’m still on sick leave, sir, so it’s my own time I’m wasting,’ snapped Hat unwisely.
‘I’m not talking about your sodding time, which I agree isn’t worth much,’ grated Dalziel. ‘I’m talking about my time, which is worth millions, and the sergeant’s time, which is worth quite a lot. Tell me this, lad. You’re quick enough to spout accusations against Penn. You find something bad about your girl, you going to be as quick letting us know?’
Hat did not answer.
‘Right. Then sod off out of here and next time I see you, bedtime ’ull be over and I’ll not make allowances.’
Hat, blank faced, only a certain rigidity around the shoulders indicating any feeling, left, not closing the door behind him because he didn’t trust himself not to slam it.
The Fat Man glowered after him then redirected the glower at Shirley Novello.
‘Let that be a lesson to you, lass.’
‘Yes, sir. What about, sir?’
‘About the price of tea, what d’you think? And while you’re at it, what do you think?’
‘I think being in love doesn’t necessarily make a man stupid, sir.’
‘Aye, but it helps mebbe. You not got any work to do, lass?’
‘Yes. What about you?’ was the answer that orbited Novello’s mind without getting anywhere near escape velocity. She was also wondering, being the kind of cop who could think of several things at the same time, whether she should mention the broken vase containing the ashes of Pomona’s twin brother. Hat had mentioned this as he poured out the story to her, and maybe her raised eyebrow reaction had kept it out of the version he gave both Wield and Dalziel. Probably wise. She shuddered to think what the Fat Man would have made of it. As for herself, the questions to answer were, was it relevant? And was there any professional advantage in revealing it?
Answer to both at the moment was, not so far as she could see.
‘Just going, sir,’ she said. And went.
‘So, Wieldy, what do you make of it?’
The sergeant shrugged, ‘Owt or nowt, sir.’
‘Aye. Owt or nowt,’ said Dalziel thoughtfully. ‘I’ll have a word with Penn. You watch Bowler, OK? I think the bugger’s given me indigestion. I’d best have another pint.’
Wield took the hint and stood up. When he returned, the Fat Man was eating his pie.
‘Glad to see that lunch with the Chief hasn’t spoilt your appetite, sir,’ he said.
‘Watch it! Sarcasm I’ll take from buggers with letters after their name, they can’t help it. But sergeants ought to talk as plain as they look.’
This looked like a cue, so Wield told him about the Praesidium heist tip.
‘Bit vague. No names? Times? Details?’
‘No, sir.’
‘Source reliable?’
‘Can’t say, sir. This is a first.’
‘Aye, but in your judgment?’
Wield considered then said, ‘Don’t think they’d deliberately jerk me around, but that doesn’t mean they’re not just trying to impress.’
‘And how much did this excuse for a tip-off cost us?’ said Dalziel.
‘Nothing. Down to civic duty.’
‘Oh, aye? Don’t see much of that these days. Not getting yourself a fan club, are you, Wieldy?’ said Dalziel, shooting him that keen glance which was one of the few missiles Wield did not feel his inscrutable features a complete defence against.
‘Just came up in casual conversation,’ he said.
‘Bit too bloody casual for me. Not till Friday, but? That gives you time to see if you can get a bit of flesh on your new chum’s bones then. By God, this pie’s good. Jack must’ve changed his barber. You not eating, Wieldy?’
‘No, sir. Things to do. See you back at the station.’
He rose, intending to make a dash for the door, when it opened and Pascoe came in.
‘My God,’ said Dalziel. ‘What’s up wi’ thee? You look like a hen that got shagged by an ostrich and feels an egg coming on. And why aren’t you in court?’
‘Postponed till Wednesday. Belchamber says his client’s too ill to attend. Reckons he’s got this Kung Flu.’
‘Kung arseholes! And the beak bought it?’
‘Belchamber produced a doctor’s certificate. But give the beak his due, he said, “All right, same time Wednesday, but take notice, Mr Belchamber. If your client is still too ill to attend, we shall proceed in his absence.” Which got an unctuous reassurance and a little apologetic glance in my direction. There’s something about that bastard … I need a drink.’
‘I’ll have one with you. Man shouldn’t drink alone.’
The Fat Man watched Pascoe go to the bar, then said, ‘Don’t often see Pete letting someone rattle his cage, not unless he’s called Roote. What do you think, Wieldy? Yon greaseball Belchamber up to summat?’
‘Wouldn’t know, sir.’
‘Why not? He’s one of yours, isn’t he?’
‘Meaning gay?’ said Wield unfazed. ‘Wouldn’t surprise me, but it doesn’t mean we meet in the Turkish baths and exchange confidences. How about you in the Gents, sir?’
This was a good riposte, but not a counter accusation. ‘The Gents’ was short for the Mid-Yorkshire Gentlemen’s Club, of which Dalziel was a member mainly because so many people had wanted to blackball him.
‘Most on ’em think the sun shines out of his arse,’ said Dalziel. ‘Wankers. Couldn’t separate steak from kidney in a pudding.’
Wield looked sadly at the few crumbs of his pie remaining on the plate, then took his leave once more and made for the door. Pascoe returned from the bar with two pints. Normally he wasn’t much of a beer drinker at lunchtime, but the Belcher left a nasty taste.
As he sat down he said, ‘Sir. I’ve been thinking …’
‘Sod thinking. Try drinking. All things come to him who sups.’
Pascoe raised his glass.
‘For once, sir,’ he said, ‘you may be right. Kill all the lawyers!’
‘I’ll drink to that,’ said Dalziel.
5
The Cemetery
Dusk comes early even on the brightest December day and when the clouds sag low like dusty drapes over an abandoned bier, there’s never much more light than you’ll catch in the gloaming of a dead man’s eyes.
So though it was not yet four o’clock, the streetlamps of Peg Lane were already kindling as Rye Pomona slipped out of Church View.
Under her arm she carried a Hoover bag.
At first she had tried with brush and pan to retrieve the fine ash which, if the undertaker were to be believed, comprised the selfsame molecules that had once danced around each other to form the
limbs and organs of her beloved twin, Sergius.
But, do what she might, shards of china, household dust, carpet fluff, and all the cosmetic debris of her bedroom had been inseparably commingled in the pan while traces of ash remained beyond the reach of bristle in cracks and crannies from which it could only be summoned by Gabriel’s trumpet on Judgment Day.
Or a Hoover if you couldn’t wait that long.
This was the gallows humour with which she diverted herself as she went about the task of vacuuming her room. What else could she do? Sing a hymn? Speak a prayer? No, Serge would have found the absurdity of the situation hilarious and she would not let him down by relapsing into maudlin solemnity.
In fact, come to think of it, Serge would have found the whole business of keeping his ashes in a jar on her bedroom shelf ridiculous. ‘Abso-fucking-lutely typical!’ she could hear him cry. ‘I always said you were made for the stage. You’re a true-born drama queen!’ Well, the accident had ended her career plans. Not much future even in this age of teleprompts for an actress whose mind went blank not just of her lines but of language itself whenever she walked onstage. But, oh! how small a price this seemed to be to pay for causing the death of her closest kin, her dearest friend, the better half of herself. And the Furies had thought so too, pursuing her to the frontiers of madness – no, beyond – in their quest for retribution. She should have been warned. The records of history and of literature are unanimous. Only the detail varies of the horrors that invariably attend all man’s attempts to raise the dead. That period of her life seemed to her now like a journey through a Gothic landscape by night whose veil of dark was torn aside from time to time by brief jags of lightning to show sights that made the returning blackness welcome. That journey was over, thank God, but the past was not another country which you could simply leave behind. Travel as far and as fast as you could, there were parts of it you dragged with you. Only Hat offered her any hope of freedom. With him she found complete if temporary oblivion. In him she regained all she had lost and more. The half of herself that died with Sergius had been the irreplaceable closeness of kin, but in Hat’s embrace she found a new completeness of kith which promised to make her whole again.
But the Kindly Ones know their stuff. Guilt, horror, self-loathing, these are coals of the selfsame fire. Heap them high and they can get no hotter. There is a deep which has no lower; a worst where pangs wring no wilder. So what’s a frustrated Fury to do?
Aeons past they had learned their answer.
You don’t pour water on a drowning man, you show him dry land.
Waking in Hat’s arms, for a moment she could look ahead to a green and pleasant landscape whose rolling hills were bathed in golden sunshine. And then a band of white-hot metal snapped around her skull and her head was twisted round till she saw once more what it was she trailed behind her.
She was a murderer; worse, a serial killer, one of those monsters they paraded before you on tele-documentaries, inviting you to marvel how ordinary they seemed, to speculate what warped gene, what ruined childhood had brought them to this monstrosity.
She had killed nine people – no, not that many – the first two, the AA man and the boy with the bazouki, she had only assisted at their deaths, which she had taken as signs that she was on the right track – a track which had led her beyond all mathematical equivocation to seven indisputable murders, by knife, by poison, by gunshot, by electrocution …
Deluded (it was a delusion. Wasn’t it? She knew that now. Didn’t she?) into believing that through an alphabetically signposted trail of blood she could come once more to her dead brother, and talk with him, and give him back something of that lost life her wilful selfish stupidity had stolen from him, she had done these dreadful things. And not unwillingly, not under constraint, but eventually with eagerness, with glee even, revelling in her sense of power, of invulnerability, until the trail led her to her last victim, her boss at the library, Dick Dee, a man she liked and admired.
That was torment enough to give her pause. And when she saw the imagined signs pointing clearly towards the man she was coming to love, to Hat Bowler, she began to wake as it were from a dream, only to find herself pinned by black memory in a nightmare.
Was atonement possible? Or – God forbid – relapse?
She did not know. Nothing, she knew nothing … sometimes even the horrors seemed so far beyond her comprehension that she almost believed they had indeed been a dream … she needed help, she knew that … but who was there to talk to? Only Hat, and that was unthinkable.
So forget the future, she had no future, she had exchanged it for the past. Hardly a fair swap, screamed the Furies. We want change! But it would have to do. We creep under what comfort we can find in a whirlwind.
Getting rid of Sergius’s ashes wasn’t a step forward, but it was a step in that marking of time which kept her in the present.
Ashes to ashes … dust to the dustbin. That was the obvious way to dispose of them. But she found herself unable to do it.
Instead, holding the bag tight against her breast, she crossed the narrow road and pushed open the squeaky gate into the churchyard. Ahead loomed the tower, black on dark grey against the wintry sky. This was an old burial place. Here a marbled angel folded her grieving wings, there a granite obelisk pointed an accusing finger at the sky, but for the most part the memorials were modest headstones, many so flaky and lichened their messages to the living were almost impossible to trace with finger or with eye. Few were of such recent vintage that family members still kept them tidy or laid anniversary flowers. A cold wind whispered through the long grass and a hunting cat miaowed an almost silent protest at her for interrupting his patient vigil, then sinewed away.
Distantly she could perceive the glow of the populous city and hear the chitter of its traffic, but these lights and sounds had nothing to do with her. She stood like a ghost in a ghostly world whose insubstantiality was her proper medium now. Some memory might remain in this other place of that other place, but the laws of physics by which mortals walk and drive and fly over the earth and by which the earth itself and all the planets and all the stars swing round each other in their crazy reel, were the dreams of an amoeba. She felt as if she could float up through the looming tower and with one small step be on the invisible moon.
You stupid bitch! she said to herself in an attempt at a rescuing anger. Getting rid of Serge’s ashes is meant to be a move away from all this crazy crap!
And with a series of movements like an orgasmic spasm, she shook the dust out of the Hoover bag.
The wind caught it and for a moment she could see the fine powder twisting and coiling in the air as if trying to hold together and reconstitute itself in some living form.
Then it was gone.
She turned away, eager to be out of this place.
And shrieked as she saw a figure standing beside an ancient headstone which leaned to one side as if something had just pushed it over to open a passage from the grave.
‘I’m sorry,’ said a voice. ‘I didn’t mean to startle you, but I was worried … are you all right?’
Not Serge! A woman. She was relieved. And disappointed? God, would it never stop?
‘Yes, I’m fine. Why shouldn’t I be? And who the hell are you?’
Speaking abruptly was the easiest way to control her voice.
‘Mrs Rogers … I think we’re neighbours … it is Ms Pomona, isn’t it?’
‘Yes. My neighbour, you say?’
Her eyes, accustomed now to the dark, could make out the woman’s features. Mid to late thirties perhaps, a round face, not unattractive without being remarkable, her expression a mixture of embarrassment and concern.
‘Yes. Just since last week though. We haven’t met but I saw you going into your flat a couple of times. I was just walking down the lane now and I saw you … I’m sorry … none of my business … sorry if I startled you.’
She gave a nervous smile and began to turn away. Not once had her gaze
gone to the Hoover bag – which must have been quite an effort, thought Rye. You spot someone emptying their vacuum cleaner in a churchyard, you’re entitled to wonder if there’s anything wrong!
‘No, hold on,’ she said. ‘You’re going back to Church View? I’ll walk with you.’
She fell into step beside Mrs Rogers and said, ‘My name’s Rye. Like the whisky. Sorry I was so brusque, but you gave me a shock.’
‘I’m Myra. I’m sorry but I thought that anything in a place like this … even a polite cough’s going to sound a bit creepy!’
‘Especially a polite cough,’ said Rye, laughing. ‘Which flat are you then?’
‘The other side of you from Mrs Gilpin.’
‘Ah, you’ve met Mrs Gilpin. No surprise there. Not meeting Mrs Gilpin is the hard thing.’
‘Yes,’ smiled the other woman. ‘She did seem quite … interested.’
‘Oh, she’s certainly that.’
They had reached the gate. Across the road they saw a figure standing at the front door of Church View. It was Hat.
Rye came to a halt. She wanted to see him but she didn’t want him to see her, not coming from the churchyard with a Hoover bag in her hand.
Mrs Rogers said, ‘Isn’t that the detective?’
‘Detective?’
‘Yes, the one who was round earlier asking if we’d seen anyone suspicious hanging around the building over the weekend.’
Death's Jest-Book Page 13