Arms and the Women

by Reginald Hill

  He set the thought aside as irrelevant to present purposes and ran on fast-forward through his subsequent encounters with the woman, up to and including the last time he’d opposed bail in court. When the magistrate had rejected the application, he’d looked across to the dock and she’d given him a thousand-watt don’t-worry-about-it smile and he’d realized he was giving her a hey-I’m-really-sorry-about-it grimace.

  He smiled now at the recollection and Dalziel said, ‘Summat?’

  ‘Sorry.’

  And there wasn’t likely to be any summat, he thought. Looked like the Fat Man had over-reached himself, and in the weirdest direction for a man whose usual attitude to psychology was to hate it as an unfilled can.

  One more try before he told the silly old bugger he was slipping.

  He turned down the brightness on Kelly Cornelius’s image and ran the sequence once again.

  And then, as when a man dazzled by the full moon turns his gaze aside and in the corner of his eye glimpses what was always there though unregarded, a star, and has to blink and quarter the sky several times before he finds it again, so now he saw a summat and looked again and saw it again, and still had to look a third time before he could acknowledge what he was looking at.

  ‘What?’ said Dalziel.

  ‘When you were in court yesterday, you say you saw Superintendent Hubbard from Fraud?’

  ‘Aye,’ said Dalziel with retrospective relish. ‘Saw him and spoke to him.’

  ‘And was there someone with him?’

  ‘Aye.’

  ‘What did he look like?’

  ‘Stocky. Dark hair, thinning. Mouth like a rusty hinge, take a crowbar to open it. Grey suit, good worsted, nice cut, but he stuffed his pockets like a greedy poacher.’

  ‘So, not thirtyish, fair-haired, nice smile, Prince of Wales check and expensive dark-tan moccasins?’

  ‘Not unless he’d had a nasty shock since you saw him… hey, but, hang about!’ The Fat Man riffled through the papers on his desk. ‘That’s Ellie’s description of the guy who tried to snatch her! Are you saying…?’

  ‘Last time I was at court it was also the description of the man sitting with Hubbard,’ said Pascoe. ‘And I saw them outside, getting into a BMW. Shit! You’re right, sir. I must have made a sort of subliminal connection. But it wasn’t just wanting to please teacher that made me look for better reasons for picking on the Cornelius case. I mean, for God’s sake, even now I think you may be right, I still can’t see that it makes any kind of sense.’

  ‘Just coincidence, you think?’

  ‘Why not? It happens. Unless you know something we don’t,’ said Pascoe.

  ‘Day when I don’t, I’ll resign,’ said the Fat Man. ‘What’s the time?’

  ‘Quarter to one,’ said Wield.

  ‘Past Kelly Cornelius’s check-in time, only she won’t have shown and she’s not going to show,’ said Dalziel.

  ‘Oh? And how do you know that?’

  ‘She skipped yesterday. Jumped her keeper.’

  ‘Her keeper?’ said Pascoe. ‘You were having her watched?’

  ‘Not me.’

  ‘Fraud, then?’

  The great grey head shook ponderously.

  ‘Who, then?’

  ‘You recall a few years back coming to meet me at Heathrow and us ending up supping very old malt in some fancy VIP room with a long streak of evasiveness called Sempernel? Well, he came to see me last night.’

  Pascoe said disbelievingly, ‘But I thought he was Intelligence?’

  ‘He’d not disagree.’

  ‘You saying there’s some kind of security angle here?’ cried Pascoe, now thoroughly alarmed. ‘Jesus! I thought it was just decent old-fashioned thugs we had to be worried about!’

  ‘Oh, I don’t think our Kelly need worry about old-fashioned thugs. Take a look at this. One of them e-mail things, came for me yesterday.’

  He tossed Pascoe the print-out. He read it with Wield looking over his shoulder.

  When he finished he said urgently, ‘What the hell’s going on, Andy? What’s all this got to do with Ellie?’

  ‘Wish I knew, lad. Wasn’t dead sure it had anything till you made the connection with Hubbard’s buttie in court.’

  ‘But if Sempernel came to see you…? What did he want?’

  ‘Find out what I were up to fucking about with the Cornelius case. Plus he wanted to let me know in advance she’d flown the coop.’

  ‘So that you could help to get her back?’

  ‘Just the opposite. He ended up putting down a very serious warning that from now on in, I should keep my neb out. Go through the motions, but keep my distance. I got the same message from Desperate Dan when I arrived this morning, only without the menaces.’

  ‘Menaces?’

  ‘Oh aye. Old Pimpernel talks polite, but he laid it on the line. Any interference and they’ll chop off my legs. For starters.’

  ‘So you’re going to steer clear, are you?’ said Pascoe disbelievingly.

  ‘Think I should have a bit more bottle, do you, lad?’ asked Dalziel. ‘Mebbe before you start sounding the charge from the rear, you should know that Sempernel made it clear it weren’t just my legs on the block. Friends and colleagues got the black spot too. You fancy mixing it with the Funny Buggers, do you?’

  ‘I fancy finding out why they started mixing it with Ellie in the first place,’ retorted Pascoe.

  ‘That’s reasonable. Wieldy, you got owt to say?’

  The sergeant said, ‘I’m just wondering why they’ve warned you off, sir. Don’t make sense. All right, you stuck your neb in and she got bail then took the chance to do a runner. I can see how they’d be a bit pissed off with you, but I can’t see why they wouldn’t be glad of any local help they could get to track her down. That’s cutting off your nose to spite your face.’

  Dalziel looked at his sergeant and Pascoe read his thought. In your case, lad, likely no bugger would notice. But happily it remained unspoken.

  Instead, the Fat Man said, ‘Good point. I got to thinking about it last night.’

  In fact, it was Cap Marvell who’d got to think about it, poking him in the middle of the night to at the same time make the point and offer a solution. Then, like the sensible lass she was, she’d suggested that with them both being awake they might as well improve the shining hour.

  He smiled reminiscently, caught Pascoe’s curious gaze, frowned and said, ‘I think I did them a favour. I reckon Cornelius caught them on the hop when she did her first runner and headed off to the airport. It was you that sorted that out by getting suspicious after the accident. Past couple of weeks they’ve been rethinking the situation and wondering how to play it. Letting her think she’d got away from them again was one option, but she’s bright enough to twig if they made it too obvious. So when I came along and did it for them they were probably chuffed to buggery. Which means they don’t want our help in finding her because…’

  He looked at them expectantly.

  ‘… because they think they already know where she’s heading,’ said Pascoe.

  ‘And they don’t want us tracking her down and banging her up again with no possibility of bail this time,’ added Wield.

  The three men fell silent for a while, each turning the matter in his mind like a 3-D computer projection.

  ‘So what do we do?’ asked Pascoe finally.

  ‘Well, me, I like to know what’s what on my patch,’ said the Fat Man. ‘But no need for anyone else to risk getting their legs chopped off. What say you, Pete?’

  ‘I won’t be happy till I know that whatever links this business to what happened to Ellie and Daphne Aldermann is done and finished,’ said Pascoe.

  They both looked at Wield who shrugged and said, ‘My legs were always my worst feature.’

  ‘Thank God for long trousers,’ said Dalziel fervently. ‘OK, let’s give it a go. But carefully, eh? Like we’re just covering ourselves by going through the motions. So where do we start? Your c
all, Pete. It was you as got us into this mess to start with.’

  Pascoe laughed aloud at the assertion. It was a sound that Wield realized he hadn’t heard much for some little while.

  ‘Well,’ said the DCI, ‘like you’re always telling us, sir, only Chief Constables can vanish without trace. Don’t suppose Sempernel gave any details of how or where she slipped the leash?’

  ‘No. Except he did say something about the park. Charter Park, I think he meant.’

  ‘Which is between her flat and the town centre. Right, Wieldy, you start there. See if anyone saw anything. Sir, one thing I wondered about a woman like Cornelius. With her abilities and personality, how come she ended up working for a small-scale set-up like Nortrust when the big financial world was her oyster? I didn’t really get anywhere when I talked to people at the bank. It’s like asking monks about their sex life, talking to bankers about fraud. You know everybody in this town, sir, including George Ollershaw. If he’s seriously in the frame, maybe there’s a personal connection there we don’t know about. Anything you could prise loose could be helpful.’

  ‘Oh aye. And what are you going to do?’

  ‘I’ll turn over her flat again. Plus, I’ve got details of all her credit cards and so forth. I’ll check these out for activity since she got bail and follow up any leads. OK? It’s tedious, I know, but like you’re always telling us, sir, if you don’t do the housework, you can’t have the vicar to tea.’

  He sprang to his feet and strode rapidly out of the room.

  ‘Did I really say that, Wieldy?’

  ‘Think it was summat about, you can’t expect the vicar’s wife to put out on the kitchen floor, sir,’ said Wield.

  ‘Sounds more like it,’ said Dalziel. ‘But it makes a change to see the lad so full of bubbles. He’s not been a bundle of fun recently. What’s happened? Got a new supplier, has he?’

  ‘Rosie’s illness and the Beulah case really knotted him up,’ said the sergeant. ‘Then just as they’re getting over it, along comes this business to knock him back. I know that this morning he was really chuffed to think he’d got Ellie and Rosie well out of harm’s way.’

  ‘Aye, well, I can understand that. Hostages to fortune, eh? Who said that?’

  ‘I think it were you, sir,’ said Wield.

  ‘Think I were right to send Ivor with them, Wieldy? Mebbe Seymour or Bowler would have been better.’

  ‘Novello’s fine, sir,’ Wield reassured him. ‘Tough as either of them, and a lot less noticeable. Any road, they’re well away from the action out at Axness. Makes Enscombe sound like Piccadilly Circus. Last time there was any excitement out there was when they heard about Mafeking.’

  ‘Is that right? How did that turn out, anyway?’

  ‘All right, I think, sir.’

  ‘That’s a relief,’ said Andy Dalziel. ‘Let’s hope this one’s got a happy ending too.’

  iii

  the pavilion by the sea

  ‘Stupid bloody woman. Stupid bloody woman. Stupid bloody woman,’ chanted Feenie Macallum in time with each impact as the Land Rover bounced over the field.

  She kept up the mantra even when she reached the relative smoothness of the road, increasing the tempo as the vehicle hit the potholed gravel drive sweeping up to Gunnery House and bringing it to a climax as she drove through the doorway of a ramshackle barn.

  ‘I hope,’ said Kelly Cornelius, lying in the rear, ‘you’re not referring to me.’

  ‘Of course not. That Aldermann woman turning up like that.’

  ‘I thought you said it was her cottage?’

  ‘What’s ownership got to do with anything? Am I supposed to tell the sea I own this place? You stay here till I see what I can sort out.’

  ‘Here?’

  ‘There are worse places. As you should know.’

  ‘Yes, I know, but I’m terrified of rats.’

  ‘And there are worse things than rats. But have no fear. Most seem to have left. With the wisdom of their kind, they like to keep two steps ahead of the ocean. So just stay still.’

  ‘Yes, but…’

  ‘My dear, I am getting too old for this. Bud’ zticha!’

  Which was belt up! in Czech, but she didn’t need to translate. The tone did it all for her.

  Every language has its strengths, and access to so many gave Feenie Macallum a very wide choice of mots justes.

  When she was eight years old, for example, she could tell her father to go to hell in six different languages, none of them English.

  He’d had to hire a governess to teach her the language of her native country.

  She had hated him, willing herself to believe that her mother was dying because she had come back to Gunnery, rather than that she had come back to Gunnery to die. But her mother’s last words to her had been an instruction (in what language she couldn’t recall) to love her father. And when the night before the funeral she had stolen into the room where the body lay and found Macallum weeping by the open coffin, obedience to this dying wish had seemed after all to be a possibility.

  She had held his hand at the graveside, and that night when a loneliness more piercing than a Carpathian frost had gripped her heart, she had slipped out of bed and stolen into her father’s room in search of warmth and comfort.

  He was, she discovered, in no position to offer them. Indeed, as later (much later) reflection suggested to her, he was perhaps in search of them himself. But no such plea in mitigation rose in her mind as she watched him thrusting himself into the arched and eager body of the governess athwart the great double bed.

  This set the pattern of their future relationship; reconciliations and armistices all ending sooner or later in new outbreaks of war.

  The governess departed, to be replaced by a male tutor who presented a different kind of sexual problem. The arm around her shoulder as he sat by her side to help with her work could be put down to pedagogic familiarity. The hand sliding up her leg and the fingers trying to pry beneath her knicker elastic couldn’t. She drove a fountain pen so hard into his forearm that she severed the radial artery.

  He was taken to hospital and never returned. To her father’s interrogation, Feenie only replied, ‘Accidents happen.’

  After that, he sent her to the local primary school. She was fluent in schoolyard English in a week and classroom English in a month.

  And now all her memories were in English. As she grew older she was finding that the distant past projected itself on her mind with ever increasing clarity, but so far it still hit a barrier when it reached those non-English days before the return to Axness. There was something there, in fact a great deal, but all a blur of mingling colours and overlapping images. She looked forward to the time when her ageing memory eventually got these into focus, amusing herself with the thought that perhaps her dying words would be in a language unrecognizable to the attendant nurses. But until that breakthrough happened, even her image of her mother alive and well derived not from any firm recollection of those early years but from the portrait of Mr and Mrs Macallum at Home which hung above the fireplace in the Grand Hall of Gunnery House.

  She paused before it now to gather her thoughts as she entered the house. It was the only painting left in the place. The rest were long gone to the salesrooms. Macallum, who had little time for art, had simply bought pictures of the size and style to fit the spaces on the walls of his newly acquired house. Some of the artists had, happily, come back into fashion and they’d brought a decent price.

  The portrait was different. Macallum had enquired who was the best portrait painter around and on being told Augustus John, had pursued the artist with offers of a very large fee, though rumour had it that it was the exotic beauty of Feenie’s mother that had made him accept the commission. It was probably worth more than most of the others put together, but Feenie had so far resisted the temptation to turn it into cash, justifying herself with the thought that at least its value was increasing. This justification she’d also applied to
Macallum’s well-stocked cellar, though in that case it had proven specious on account of the steady inroads she had made into it over the years, and some nights after a bottle or two, picked at random, she would stand before the painting, contemplating cutting it in half like an old photo and selling off her father while retaining her mother.

  No such act of vandalism occupied her thoughts now, partly because sober she doubted if it would be financially very productive, but mainly because she knew the time was fast approaching (indeed, in the eyes of some had long past) when Gunnery House would be uninhabitable. She could camp out indefinitely in the back of her old Land Rover but it was no place for a full-length portrait.

  ‘So it’s the saleroom for you after all, my dears,’ she said.

  Her mother, whose high Slavic cheekbones and deep-grey expressive eyes had been splendidly caught by the artist, making it easy to believe she was the Russian aristocrat she claimed to be, looked out with the blasé indifference of one to whom the vulgarities of money meant nothing. Beside her, Macallum’s expression of grim satisfaction, though doubtless inspired by the notion of a common old working man hiring a famous artist to record for posterity his wife’s great beauty and his own matching success, could easily be imagined to derive from a posthumous awareness that the artist’s fee had also been a very productive financial investment.

  Not that he would take any satisfaction from the use it would be put to. But by now he ought to have grown accustomed to that.

  ‘Thank you, oteko,’ said Feenie, using the Slovak diminutive which so much irritated him.