Good Morning, Midnight

by Reginald Hill

  This started a long time back. I were younger then. Not a lot younger but enough. Oh aye, likely looking at me you’d not be able to tell much difference. When you’ve got the bone structure, you don’t lose your looks. But inside, that’s where it counts, and to tell the truth these past couple of years I’ve felt it counting a bloody sight quicker.

  I’m not saying I’m getting past it.

  No, most of the time I can still feel the old spirit rattling around deep inside.

  But it’s a ghost haunting a bloody ruin.

  If that’s sympathy on thy face, best wipe it off else I might scrub it clean with a knuckle flannel.

  America, that’s where it started.

  That’s where most things start these days, good and bad.

  Linda Steele were one of the good things. At least I thought so to begin with.

  I know it’s over ten years ago, but don’t let on you don’t recall Linda. OK, you never met her, but I bet she’d not been in my house five minutes afore all the station wags were running round saying, “Have you seen yon bit of dusky chuff the super’s brought himself back from the States? Wish I’d asked him to get me one!”

  Well, like I always say, if you can’t take a joke, you shouldn’t have joined.

  But if ever I get my hands on the sod who wrote that limerick in the bog, I’ll shake him till his teeth rattle like his lousy rhymes.

  Linda were a journalist who doubled up working for the CIA, which is like a tick hanging out with crab lice. But, you know me, I’m not judgmental, and we came to a working arrangement. I admit I were a bit surprised when she turned up here. Even with my magnetic personality, you don’t expect a gorgeous young blackbird like Linda to come flapping across the Atlantic just to get a second helping of nuts. But she came clean, or at least so I thought. Seems she’d told her funny bugger boss she wanted out and was proposing to take a trip to Europe, and he said that were fine, no problem his side, but could she do him one last favour and check up that I weren’t going to give anyone any grief shooting off my mouth about what had happened in the States. Me, the arsehole of discretion! Any road, even if I’d wanted to blab, I’d been heavily sat on by our funny buggers soon as I landed. You’ll likely recall that. You were there, remember?

  So I told Linda she could set her boss’s mind at rest. She were really grateful. Also she’d got nowhere to stay till she got her plans sorted, so pretty soon we’d got our old working arrangement going again.

  I liked her a lot, even more now she said she’d resigned from the funny buggers. She told me stuff about the CIA would make your hair stand on end. But when I said nowt the Yanks did would surprise me, she said I shouldn’t be so goddam superior, our lot were just as bad. Only difference was that over there, they had so much information they kept tripping over it, while over here they had so little they had to make it up.

  Aye, we had many a good laugh, and she liked a drink, and in bed she—but a pillar of the community like you don’t want to hear stuff like that. I thought me birthday had come every day. I’d wake up and look at that lovely black face lying on the pillow next to me, and think, You’re a lucky bugger, Andy Dalziel!

  And I’d tickle her ear and whisper summat daft like, “Good morning, Midnight.”

  Then she’d open her eyes and smile and show me all those lovely white teeth and say, “Hi.”

  And it never ever crossed my mind to wonder what she were thinking when she woke up and the first thing she saw in the morning was me …

  Good stuff this. You want a fill-up? Please yourself.

  Well, I knew it couldn’t go on forever but Linda seemed in no hurry to move on and I could see no reason to rock the boat by asking her what her plans were. She said she liked it here, the folk were real friendly and it was the first time in years she’d been able to relax, no deadlines to meet, no bosses snapping at her heels, nobody to please but herself. And me.

  Oh aye. She were very good at pleasing me.

  Sometimes I felt so pleased, I could hardly get out of bed in the morning.

  When I were out at work she’d go wandering off by herself. She hired herself a car and drove around all over the place, sightseeing, shopping, going to a movie. She never seemed to get bored and when I got back home she’d tell me all about it, excited, like a kid, making daft ordinary things sound interesting.

  One day she told me she’d almost had an accident. Daydreaming, she forgot she were driving on the left and found herself heading straight for another car. They both hit the brakes and stopped, no damage done. Linda got out to apologize and explain, but far from being narked, the other driver just laughed and said it was OK, she understood, she were American too, and it had taken her forever to get used to driving on the left.

  Aye, you’ve guessed it. The other driver were Kay. Kay Maciver as she was then.

  They chatted a bit then went their ways. Couple of days later Linda went into yon Yankee coffee-shop in the High, you know the one, costs a fortune, coffee all tastes like owl piss. Kay were sitting there. Linda said hello, place were a bit crowded so she asked if Kay would mind if she joined her, they got talking, liked the look of each other and the upshot was they arranged to meet again. I knew Pal Maciver, not close, but we’d met, and I knew all about the Yanks taking over Maciver’s, of course, and him getting himself a Yankee wife as part of the deal, leastways that’s how the jokers down the rugby club saw it, so I were able to fill Linda in with what I knew, and I were dead chuffed she’d found a mate as it seemed likely to make her hang around up here a bit longer.

  So everything in the garden were lovely. But it doesn’t matter how green the grass grows and how sweet the flowers smell, a man in our line don’t stop being a cop just because he enjoys a bit of gardening. That’s where some women get it wrong.

  They think just because they can switch you to any channel they want by pressing the right buttons, they can do the same trick by remote control, but a man’s bollocks aren’t tuned to a zapper, and once her hands are off the controls, his brain clicks back in.

  Two things began bothering me. One was I were pretty sure Linda was doing drugs. She weren’t blatant but I’d been in the business too long not to spot the signs. Can’t say I was surprised. Back then, recreational drugs weren’t a big problem yet in Mid-Yorkshire, but over in the States I’d seen and heard enough to know that if you lived in what they call the fast lane, they were there for the asking.

  Second thing was, I’d met Kay Maciver. First time, I came home and found Linda had asked her round. Then we went out for a drink with her a few times. Pal too—old Pal, I mean. He obviously found it hard to understand what a gorgeous bint like Linda were doing shacking up with an old buffalo like me, which I found a bit offensive from a man in his situation. But Kay just took me and Linda in her stride. That’s what I liked about her. She saw everything, judged nowt. Having her around was very peaceful. We got on like a house on fire. I could really talk to her. If Linda had been the jealous type, it might have pissed her off a bit. But to get jealous, you need to give a fuck about someone and, while I hope she liked me a bit, I don’t think it got close to that.

  Any road, this time I were sitting yacking with Kay while Linda were off in the bog probably having a pinch of white snuff, and Kay let drop that Linda had told her she’d once worked for one of the papers in Hartford, which were where Kay came from. This was something in common which had helped them get on so well to start with. The HQ of Ashur-Proffitt was in Hartford, and Linda, being a journalist, thought a nice human interest story about local firm conquering the world might go down well back there, and she’d been on to her newspaper contact and got the go-ahead. Kay, being Tony Kafka’s PA as well as being married to Pal, who was still on the Board of Directors, was well placed to smooth the way for Linda to take a close look at Ash-Mac’s and talk to people there for her piece.

  Linda had mentioned nowt of this to me, plus in all the tales we’d swopped about our backgrounds, this Hartford place had
never even been mentioned.

  Next day I put in a call to Dave Thatcher. I think I told you about him. Captain Thatcher, this New York cop who’d helped me a lot when I were over there. Lovely man. Looked like Joe Louis’s sparring partner. I had a laugh about his name and tried to start a rumour he were Maggie’s love-child by Idi Amin … Any road, it were Dave who first tipped me off Linda worked for their funny buggers as well as being a journalist. I explained my situation with Linda. When he stopped laughing he said, “You two have a love-child, hope it don’t have your looks and Linda’s colour, else it could make Idi Amin look like Miss World,” so he hadn’t forgotten. He rang me back a couple of hours later, a lot more serious. His funny bugger contact said that to the best of his knowledge, Linda was still on the books. Her CV had no record of her ever having worked for a paper in Hartford.

  And there was something else. You recall back in the mid-eighties there was a big political scandal in the States when it came out there’d been arms sales to Iran with the profits going to the Contra rebels in Nicaragua so they could buy guns to use against the government, who were too left wing for Ron Reagan and his chums? Of course you do. I bet that missus of thine were waving a banner outside the Yankee Embassy in Grosvenor Square. Seems that Ashur-Proffitt, who had a big network of contacts in the Middle East, were seriously involved here. None of their people ever got named, let alone indicted. Not that it would have made much difference if they had. Just about every bugger who was tried and found guilty either had his sentence quashed on appeal or got pardoned by old man Bush when he took over. Who put the mock in democracy, eh? Our own bunch of jokers, past and present, learned a lot from the way the Yanks handled things there.

  But the white hats were riding around back then, guns blazing, and it seemed wise to the big nobs at Ashur-Proffitt to keep their heads below the parapet for a bit, and some people said this was why they suddenly got interested in finding outlets in Europe, particularly those bits of Europe with a nice sympathetic right-of-centre Yankophile government.

  And it seems their funny buggers weren’t all singing off the same hymn sheet either. Not all of them were paid-up members of the Ollie North fan club. Couple of those who were went to jail, but there were plenty of others who’d have been only too delighted to pay off old scores and clear promotion channels by sending a few more to join them. Dave Thatcher reckoned that’s why Linda got sent over here to check out Ash-Mac’s and see if she could come up with a smoking gun. Me being in Mid-Yorkshire fell lucky for them. Linda must have mentioned how much I’d enjoyed working undercover with her in the States, so it gave her a perfect in to set up shop on Ash-Mac’s doorstep and look for a way of getting even closer.

  OK, no need to look like that, it sounded like a right load of bollocks to me too, except that I’d met some of these people and I knew most of them had got such a distorted view of reality, they could easily have got jobs working in a telly documentary department.

  So when Dave said take care, I said thanks, I would, and I meant it.

  Only I forgot one thing. I said that having my head shagged off didn’t stop me being a cop. I forgot that it didn’t stop Linda being a spook either and she’d learned enough to spot I were getting suspicious of her, plus mebbe Dave Thatcher’s enquiries about her back in the States hadn’t been as discreet as he thought.

  I’d like to think that what happened next weren’t her idea, that she took advice and got instructions. But I daresay I’m just fooling myself.

  Realizing she couldn’t guarantee controlling me through my dick any longer, she had to find some other way of doing it. In fact I think she’d set up a fail-safe plan long in advance of me getting worried about her. I found out later that she’d been using her connection with me to make contact with some of the local pushers. “Andy Dalziel says give me a good deal or you’ll go out of business,” that sort of thing. There were a couple of occasions guys came to my door with packages for Linda, special delivery from the States, C.O.D. I took them in, handed over the money. Later I saw Linda open the packages and they were always what she’d said, items of clothing from some mail-order fashion house, or documents, whatever. What I didn’t know was I was on candid camera, taking packages and handing over cash to guys the Drug Squad had a long interest in. But the big sting came when I started feeling dodgy after dinner one night. I thought it were the prawns in this jambalaya thing she’d done. Everything went pear-shaped, then banana-shaped, then no shape at all. Then I seemed to be drifting in and out of these weird dreams. Only, next day when I saw the pictures, I realized they hadn’t been dreams at all. There I was in black-and-white and technicolour shooting up and I had the puncture marks to go with it.

  These pics were on my pillow when I woke up about four o’clock the following afternoon. I felt like death warmed up. The phone rang while I was lying on the shower floor with the cold tap turned full on. It kept ringing till I got to it. I knew it would be Linda and it was.

  She said she were sorry and she sounded like she meant it. She really liked me and believed I really liked her, but would that be enough to keep me quiet? She made it a real question and of course the answer was no it bloody wouldn’t, so already I was feeling partly responsible for what had happened. She were good at her job, Linda, I have to give her that. All of her jobs.

  She hoped we could stay friends. In fact, she’d like to stay my very loving friend, she’d enjoyed it so much. But just now she thought it best if she took a little break to give me time to consider the situation which was that as well as the still photos, of which I’d seen a small sample, there was a video, plus pics of me handing over money for packages from known dealers, plus they had a sample of my blood, which analysis would prove was awash with drugs.

  Then she said she’d be in touch later and put the phone down.

  The door bell rang. I were still so out of things I went to answer it without even thinking.

  It was Kay. Must have been a shock for her to see me standing there, bollock naked, dripping water all over the hall mat, but she didn’t blink an eyelid, just asked if Linda was around.

  I think I said some rude things about Linda. Kay asked if she could come in. At this point I realized the state I was in and shot off to get myself dry and decent. When I came out of the bathroom into my bedroom, she were there, looking at the pics. I didn’t ask her what she were doing. Somehow all that mattered was she didn’t believe what them photos seemed to be saying, so I told her everything.

  She didn’t seem surprised, but went downstairs. I could hear her on the phone as I got dressed. When I came down she was making a cup of coffee and as I drank that she did me a great mountain of toast and fried me some eggs and half a dozen rashers. I felt better after I got that lot down. I wanted a drink but she wouldn’t let me have anything alcoholic, not till she’d done me a repeat order of food. Then she poured two glasses of malt, a big one and a little one. And she handed me the little one.

  I’d thought she might be something special from the first time I saw her, but that was when I knew it for sure, when she handed me the little Highland Park and kept the big one for herself!

  After that she lit the fire and we sat and talked, not about Linda or anything, just ordinary stuff, and finally I must have dozed off ’cos suddenly I was woken by the door bell and when I opened my eyes it were after nine o’clock.

  I heard Kay answer the door, talk to someone, then she came back in to me. She were carrying this cardboard box which she put on the floor in front of the fire. Then she said she had to be going, and that she’d call me in the morning to check I was OK.

  And she was gone before I even had time to say thank you.

  I sat there for another half-hour before I looked in the box. Truth was I were feeling better and I didn’t want to risk losing the mood. Just by sitting around talking with Kay I’d calmed down so much that even though things still looked black as midnight, somehow midnight didn’t seem such a dreadful place to be.

  The
n, only because I began to feel knackered and decided it were time to head for bed, I looked in the box.

  That woke me up.

  I couldn’t believe it. I thought I must be hallucinating again. It was all there.

  Photos, negatives, video, even the little vial of blood.

  Everything.

  I didn’t hang around.

  I stirred up the fire till it really got going then I dumped everything out of that box on to the flames and I sat there with my bottle of malt watching and occasionally stirring the coals till there was nowt left but a pile of hot ashes.

  Then I went to bed.

  End of story. End of statement.

  Christ, but all this talking makes a man thirsty. Are you ready for a top up yet, lad?

  21 • the voice of Death

  “No thank you, sir,” said Pascoe. “So let me get this straight. What you’re saying is that Kay Kafka once covered up for you and now whenever she snaps her fingers and asks for help, you come running. Would that be simply because you’re grateful, sir, or because she’s got enough on you to lose you your job if she talks?”

  It was the only time in his life that Pascoe thought that Dalziel might physically assault him.

  The Fat Man came round the desk with the speed of a Kodiak bear and put his face so close to Pascoe’s, he could smell the Highland Park on his hot breath.

  “What have you got in that college-educated, overheated brain of thine?” grated Dalziel. “Bird droppings? Have you listened to a word of what I’ve said? Well, have you?”

  “Acu-otically,” said Pascoe.

  He doubted if the word existed, but instinct told him that you don’t fight an enraged beast, you try to distract it and he knew the Fat Man could rarely resist an opportunity to mock redundant sesquipedalianism.

  “Acu-otically?” echoed Dalziel, still just an inch away. “Acu-otically?”

  He barked a disbelieving laugh and withdrew a couple of inches.

  “Acu-fucking-otically!”