Arms and the Women

by Reginald Hill

  And of course your real employers have been people whose records are not the common currency of the air, as ultimately everything reduced to electronic impulses must be, but word of mouth and cryptic scribbles on scraps of paper and nods and winks and all the old channels of communication inaccessible to such as me.

  But we don’t need them for we know what you have been doing. Your talent is turning dirty money into clean. You do this not by having your own set up which would be assailable and surveillable by the forces of law. You enter the world of international banking as a skilled and trusted employee and you use their systems with all their protections and connections and subtle interactions to move your masters’ money around so quickly and quietly and untraceably that what might have been seizable as a drug baron’s ill gotten billions ends up as clean and untouchable as a nun’s pension fund. Nothing is illegal, nothing is stolen from the banks, in fact you do them sterling service and leave them better, or at least better off, than you find them. And you never stay long enough to become a fixture or an embarrassment.

  And so it seemed would things carry on when you came back to Europe.

  First you spent your time commuting between London and Switzerland, which is to dirty money what a privet hedge is to crisp packets. You straddled Europe like a whore up a back alley, with one foot planted firmly in Credit Apollyon de Zurich and the other in Arblasters, the kind of City merchant bank which has been making the rich richer, and the poor poorer, since Richard Arblaster of that Ilk sold his shares in the South Sea Company shortly before the bubble burst.

  But next came a very strange move, away from the golden glow of the City to darkest Yorkshire, to take a dip in salary and status, social opportunity and cultural accessibility, by becoming an employee of Nortrust Bank plc, created five years ago out of a small and local demutualized building society.

  What were you playing at, my Kelly from nowhere?

  What impulse has turned you from a high-class laundry girl into a common embezzler putting you at last within reach of the long and predatory fingers of Uncle Gawain? Was this why you were suddenly upgraded from non-surveillance level to Sibyl’s Leaves? Or was it just coincidental?

  I don’t yet know. All I know about you, officially, is all that Gawain wants to be known about you officially. That is Gawain’s way. Sibyl’s Leaves is full of such bits and pieces, shreds and patches, always just enough to cover his back in case our First Mover ever checks through the folder.

  But once together in the dim light of my cave, all these individual spores and seeds of information take light and heat from each other and begin to germinate till finally, finally, the same god who binds his prophetess in darkness suddenly ravishes her with light!

  I don’t know where you’ve come from, my Kelly, not yet. But the way to find out where an animal comes from is to watch where it runs to.

  Gawain, circling high in the sky, likes his prey to freeze on the ground so that he can descend on it like a thunderbolt when he feels the moment is ripe.

  I, on the other hand, as fixed in my place as a convict in the electric chair, prefer to see the objects of my concern in movement.

  Twice now I have flushed you out and set you running free, my Kelly. Once by a cryptic note on your computer screen, and this time by a little electronic billet-doux about you to that arch-mischief-maker, my twenty-stone Puck, ol’ man Dalziel.

  The game’s afoot!

  Has anyone here seen Kelly? Kelly from…

  v

  realms of gold

  Edwin Digweed in an idly reflective post-coital moment had once asked Edgar Wield how much his choice of career had been influenced by the license it gave him to strike up conversations with strange men in parks.

  The sergeant recalled the facetia (a word his partner had once used punningly, then had to explain in both its meanings, by which time the joke had fallen somewhat flat) as he traced Kelly Cornelius’s probable route through Charter Park. In fact, on a day like this, being a cop was quite inessential as no one he approached showed the slightest concern even before he flashed his credentials (the kind of double entendre to which Edwin reacted as Wield had done to facetia), perhaps confirming Pascoe’s theory that the English have been conditioned over centuries to regard bright warm sunshine as a rare gift from God under which no evil may flourish.

  He struck gold instantly. The first person he spoke to, a woman wheeling a pram which contained a chubby child who bore an uncanny resemblance to Andy Dalziel, had been in the park the previous afternoon. She needed only one glance at the photograph Wield showed her.

  ‘Oh yes,’ she said, her face lighting up. ‘I remember seeing her. Lovely-looking girl. I remember thinking I used to have a figure like that before he came along.’

  He looked up from the pram with a most Dalziel-esque curl of the lip.

  It struck Wield, who was a connoisseur of intonation, that there was at least as much of admiration as of envy in the tone, a judgement confirmed when the woman went on, ‘It did me good just to watch her, she were such a lovely mover.’

  ‘You watched her?’ said Wield. ‘So which way was she heading?’

  The woman indicated that Cornelius had been walking from the side of the park where her flat was located towards the town centre.

  ‘Then she turned off the main path there and went down to the canal.’

  Wield followed her pointing finger and asked, ‘You see anyone else around?’

  ‘Yes, well, there would be, it was a lovely day. Like today. People need to get out, enjoy it while you can.’

  The Greenhouse Effect could turn England into a second Sahara and the natives would still be convinced each hour of sunshine was the last.

  ‘So, anyone in particular?’

  The woman thought then shook her head.

  ‘No. Kids. People. But I remember her. Full of life, she were.’

  This was strongly suggestive that the powerful impression Cornelius had clearly made on Pascoe and Dalziel was not merely sexual.

  He said, ‘Thanks a lot, luv. By the way, you don’t know our Mr Dalziel, do you? Superintendent Dalziel?’

  ‘No. Why do you ask?’

  Wield looked once more at the baby, who bared his toothless gums in a mocking smile.

  ‘No reason,’ he said.

  He made towards the canal, pausing to chat to a gang of pre-pubescent cricket players.

  Several of them had been in the same spot the previous afternoon and had no difficulty in recalling Cornelius.

  ‘She caught our ball and threw it back, proper, tha knows, not like a lass. Then she went down to the canal and watched the ducks.’

  ‘Was there anyone else around by the canal?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Yeah, there was that old tramp,’ interjected one of the other boys.

  ‘Oh yeah, but she don’t count,’ said the first speaker, unhappy at having his status as group spokesman challenged.

  ‘Which old tramp?’

  ‘Some old biddy, looks like she sleeps rough.’

  ‘How old?’

  ‘About a hundred,’ said the boy without hyperbole.

  ‘Did the young woman who can throw speak to the tramp at all?’

  A moment’s consultation, then a tentative affirmative.

  ‘So, anything else you noticed.’

  More consultation, then the spokesboy said, ‘No. What’s she done, mister?’

  ‘Nothing. Just got lost,’ said Wield. ‘Thanks.’

  As he turned away a voice said, ‘She were on a bike.’

  He turned back. The speaker, already looking like he was regretting it, was the smallest child there, slightly built, fair, almost white, hair, with a slack mouth and somewhat vacant expression.

  ‘A bike?’ said Wield. ‘You saw her on a bike?’

  The boy seemed to have exhausted his supply of words but he did give an almost imperceptible nod.

  ‘Don’t pay him no heed, mister,’ said the spokesboy. ‘He’s a
bit…’

  He tapped the side of his head.

  ‘Anyone else see a bike?’ asked Wield.

  A general shaking of heads. The fair-haired child looked close to tears.

  ‘You sure it were her?’ said Wield gently. ‘The lady who threw the ball?’

  The boy just hung his head and the others laughed, though more possessively than derisively.

  ‘Well, thanks, anyway,’ said Wield.

  As he walked away the fair-haired child suddenly yelled, ‘It were both of ’em on the bike!’

  The laughter swelled behind him, and even Wield smiled at this extension into tandem.

  But an hour later he had stopped smiling and was hurrying back towards the cricketers.

  Peter Pascoe had developed many of the carapaces necessary to long-term survival in the police force. In fact, according to his wife he now had a shell thick enough to cause envious comment on the Galapagos Islands. But he had never been able to rid himself of the distaste he felt for searching other people’s property.

  He experienced it now as he went through Kelly Cornelius’s apartment.

  He’d been here before with a Fraud DI when the case had first broken. The Fraud man had removed the PC with the odd message and some disks but found nothing else of interest to him. Pascoe had done a general search, completing what PC Hector had begun with such devastating consequences.

  ‘Looking for sackfuls of dosh, are you?’ said the Fraud man derisively. ‘If it’s anywhere, it’ll be in here, mate.’ Waving a disk.

  ‘Just getting a feel what she’s like,’ said Pascoe.

  ‘From what I hear about her, I wouldn’t mind a feel myself,’ said the other.

  Pascoe had said pleasantly, ‘Do you think you might have been too long with Fraud, Inspector? Perhaps you might consider a transfer to Vice?’

  Conversation had died thereafter till the DI, ready to leave, found himself waiting while Pascoe carefully replaced on hangers and in drawers the clothing he’d been searching through.

  ‘What’s that in aid of?’ he finally demanded.

  ‘To stop it getting creased,’ said Pascoe.

  ‘Creased?’ said the man incredulously. ‘Je-sus!’

  Now second time around Pascoe found the apartment much as he recalled leaving it. His excellent memory for detail plus the precise written notes he’d made at the time of the first search told him that Cornelius certainly hadn’t come home and packed a case with clothes in anticipation of making a run for it. As far as he could make out, she must have come from the court after her release, opened a bottle of bubbly (empty on the bathroom floor), had a bath (damp towel and discarded clothing in the linen basket), got dressed and gone out. So nothing to indicate to Sempernel’s watchers that she was on the point of doing a bunk.

  There was a pile of unopened mail on a table. Circulars, bills, a DVLC reminder. Presumably she’d taken anything personal. If there’d been anything. They’d found precious little in the way of personal papers at the time of her arrest. The nearest he’d got to her past was via a thickish photograph album he’d found at the bottom of one of her cases, though even here the lack of names, dates, or places on or under the pictures meant he was left with only a vague undetailed impression of a life spent growing up in fairly exotic settings (Mediterranean? Caribbean? Asian?). He opened it again. At last an indication she didn’t intend to hang around. There were now more gaps than photos.

  As he was preparing to leave, his mobile rang. It was ‘Hat’ Bowler whom he’d delegated to check with Cornelius’s credit card companies for details of transactions recorded in the last twenty-four hours.

  There were several, all occurring the previous afternoon in town centre stores.

  As he made a note, his gaze fell on the pile of mail. The DVLC envelope was at the top. He picked it up and opened it. It was a reminder that Cornelius needed to retax her car at the end of the month. The car was a metallic-blue Golf.

  Pocketing the form, he went out into the sunshine.

  He decided to walk to the centre, following Cornelius’s probable route. They’d never even thought about her car. Of course it was likely she had one, but she’d been using a taxi to the airport, so it didn’t come up. He checked the residents’ parking spaces in the street. No sign of a blue Golf. He put it to the back of his mind and as he strolled along, thought with envy of Ellie and Rosie relaxing by the sea at Axness. Must be nice to have enough money to afford a holiday cottage. Must be even nicer to have enough time to make good use of it. He and Ellie had once run through a list of alternative careers during one of their quieter debates about the many disadvantages of the police force. In the end she had said with rueful affection, ‘One thing’s sure, whatever else you might have done, it probably wouldn’t have affected the amount of spare time you have for your wife and family. You’d have always been banging away with Miss Whiplash.’

  ‘What? Am I supposed to start like a guilty thing surprised?’

  ‘Of course not. Far too controlled. Anyway, I’m not talking about your fancy woman but that other disciplinarian who turns you on, stern daughter of the voice of God, Duty. If you’d been a dustman, you’d have spent your weekends oiling wheelie-bins.’

  Was she right? Was he work-obsessive? When Rosie was ill, he’d dropped everything and gone running. But there was little virtue in that. What father wouldn’t? It hadn’t been a matter of choice. And while it seemed to confirm his assertion, I’ll always be there when you need me, even that (another of Ellie’s obiter dicta) depended on your definition of need.

  He was walking through Charter Park now without much recollection of how he’d got there. He paused to look around and there in the distance was Wield chatting to some kids playing cricket.

  The Fat Man would probably have bellowed something like, ‘Pay heed, lads! That’s what comes of not wearing a face mask against fast bowlers.’

  Is knowing the sort of things Dalziel would have said a step away from hearing me say them myself? he wondered.

  He left the sergeant to his converse and made his way out of the park, across the busy road, into the town centre.

  In the departmental stores he visited, his investigations proceeded at snail pace.

  At till level, the assistants lived up to their reputation of being a timorous breed, herding together in shady recesses, and shying away nervously at the approach of a questing customer. When finally cornered, they expressed a positively Hectorian bewilderment at the notion that there might be a usable correlation between credit card transactions and till receipts, then picked up telephones and emitted whimpering pleas for assistance from the leader of the pack. This usually turned out to be a formidable lady wearing a westernized version of Kabuki make-up. She listened patiently (so far as one could read any emotion in that emulsioned face), asked the same questions three times, pronounced some oxymoronic mantra on the lines of I don’t know, I’m sure, then declared, ‘I’ll need to have a word with Mr Earnshaw.’ Mr Earnshaw (in Mid-Yorkshire, all deputy managers answer to Earnshaw), a callow youth who tried for gravitas by walking slightly stooped with his hands behind his back, as if in mourning for the passing of the frock coat, next invited Pascoe to follow him to Accounts. And here at last he was greeted with a smile and an acknowledgement that shops were for selling things, and technology was for facilitating that task, by a child of some twelve or thirteen years (apparently) who produced what he wanted in five seconds flat.

  So finally he established that Kelly Cornelius had purchased various items of toiletry, lingerie, footwear and clothing, plus a small haversack into which she had presumably packed them.

  Escape kit, he thought as he stepped from the cloying air of the inevitable supraliminal parfumerie department into the momentarily preferable stench of exhaust fumes, meaning she’d come out of her apartment not totally sure that she’d be doing her runner that same afternoon, though sufficiently aware the call might come at any time for her to stick the essential photos in her handbag.
Then somewhere between the flat and the shops, she’d been given a signal, coolly spent the time she had left buying essential supplies, and then…vanished.

  So, lad, he could hear Dalziel saying, you’ve established that she’s gone? Grand! I always like having someone confirm what I’ve known for certain since yesterday evening!

  It didn’t worry him. This was his way. Drudgery divine, short but certain steps, all the time sweeping up information and gathering speed, till at last you reached the velocity necessary to take off into a flight of airy intuition.

  While Dalziel…?

  He was probably spreading sweetness and light, or something, down at the head office of Nortrust. Pascoe recalled reading a short story once in which the hero, by refusing to believe in things, destroyed them. He ended up in Threadneedle Street turning his sceptical gaze on the mighty edifice of the Bank of England, which had begun to shake, when someone pushed him under a bus. After Fat Andy’s little philosophical flight that morning with all that stuff about seeing what had to be there rather than what appeared to be there, Pascoe hoped that Nortrust had their premises well insured.

  The thought made him smile as he made his way back towards the park, and people he didn’t know or sometimes even notice smiled back at him.

  In fact, Andy Dalziel wasn’t in the offices of Nortrust. One thing he did see which the sharp eyes of neither Pascoe nor Wield could clearly discern was that the really important transactions of business life in Mid-Yorkshire weren’t conducted on commercial premises but behind the imposing portals of the Gents.

  Shortly after one o’clock he’d drifted with a cloud’s slow motion into the long dining room which was set as always with small tables for those who wished to lunch à deux, or trois or even quatre, while at the far end where a huge bay window glowered down at the busy High Street stood the broad general table for members who came in alone.