So, how did you manoeuvre an awkward customer like this into seeing things your way?
Odysseus said, ‘But that’s enough about me, Prince. How about you? Tell me about yourself, how you managed to get out of Troy, where you’re heading. Just now when I asked why you didn’t settle down with Helenus, you said something about being bound elsewhere. Where would that be?’
Aeneas looked at him doubtfully for a moment, then shrugged and said, ‘What harm to tell you? There is a land, called Hesperia by you Greeks but Italy by the natives, where the soil is fertile and whence by tradition our Trojan ancestors hailed. There I am directed to journey and establish a new and mightier Dardanian empire.’
‘Directed? Like, by the gods, you mean.’
‘Yes. By the gods.’
‘You poor sod,’ said Odysseus feelingly.
‘Why do you say that? Are we not all under the command of high Olympus? Even you, my friend, cannot deny the influence of mighty Poseidon in bringing you to this place.’
‘Aye, but there’s a difference. All I’m trying to do is get back home. Now the gods can help or hinder me as they will, but I’m heading back to Ithaca ’cos that’s where I want to be, and whatever I find there, I’ll get it sorted, ’cos it’ll be my business, not the gods’. And if that’s blasphemy, well, hit me with a thunderbolt and turn me into pork scratchings, but gods or no gods, in the end a man’s got to look after himself, ’cos no other bugger will.’
Aeneas gave him a curious look in which distaste and envy seemed strangely mixed.
‘It must be… comfortable to live a life without meaning.’
‘Meaning? You want to ask Achilles about meaning. All his heroics, and now he’d rather be back on Skyros wearing a frock with all the girls saying, Come and help me with my needlework, Stiffy.’
‘He too was in the hands of the gods.’
A whimpering sound, like a puppy in pain, came from the rear of the cave and Aeneas looked anxiously round and half rose. But the attendant came out from behind the curtain, gestured reassuringly, helped herself to a jug of water and returned to the ailing child’s bedside.
‘Aye, he was,’ said Odysseus. ‘And I expect that lad lying back there is in the hands of the gods too. Your son, is he?’
‘Yes, my boy, Ascanius. He grew sick from the violent motion of the ship as the storm drove us here. I hoped that after our landfall, his health would return, but…’
‘Can I take a look at him?’
‘Is medicine another of your skills?’ said the Prince, half-hopeful, half-mocking.
‘No, but I’ve had plenty practised on me,’ said Odysseus, with a glance down at his scarred flesh.
He went into the rear of the cave and by the light of a flaming torch held by the attendant, he studied the boy’s flushed and feverish face. Then delicately he took the child’s small hand in his huge paw and raised it slightly. The child’s eyes opened and fixed on the man’s. They stared at each other in silence for a moment, then the boy’s eyes closed and Odysseus gently released his hand. He exchanged a few low words with the attendant, then he returned to his place by the fire and helped himself to more wine. Up till now, it had always been the Prince who refilled his goblet.
He said, ‘So?’
‘So what?’ said Aeneas.
‘So what’re you not telling me?’
‘About what?’
‘About yon lad. He’s got a high fever, but his pulse is so slow it’s almost stopped, and his eyes are as bright as a lass’s when you show her the family jewels. The nurse says the lad hasn’t had any nourishment, not even medicinal herbs and such, for nigh on two days, but he’s got no better and no worse. And you…’
‘Yes? And me?’
‘You’re sitting here, passing the time with me. Like you were almost glad to have your mind taken off something.’
‘Would not any man be glad to have his mind taken off worrying about his sick child?’
Odysseus shook his head.
‘There’s nowt can do that,’ he said. ‘No, what I’ve been taking your mind off is another kind of worry, some kind of decision. It probably concerns the lad, but until you make it, nowt’s going to change with the lad, that’s how you can sit here so calmly, glad of an excuse to let time go by without doing anything. Might as well tell me about it, Prince. How can telling an old Greek soldier make things any worse?’
Aeneas regarded him coldly and said, ‘Perhaps sacrificing an old Greek villain to the high gods might make things better?’
‘Nay,’ said Odysseus, shaking his head vigorously. ‘You thought that, you’d have done it half an hour since. Likely there’s a god mixed up in it somewhere, there usually is. But this is between the pair of you.’
The Trojan sipped his wine then shrugged.
‘Why not? Let us see what the craftiest mind in the civilized world can make of what I say. Two nights ago, keeping watch over my boy and praying for his recovery, I was visited by a vision. Vision! Strange term for an ancient, crook-backed and carbuncled crone, but this is what we must call one who can pass the guards outside this cave, both coming and going, undetected. She told me that this island was called Ogygia, and it was sacred to the nymph Calypso, daughter of Atlas, grandchild of mighty Uranus, most ancient of the gods, and that we had defiled it with our presence. If we left within three days, we would go unpunished. But a condition of our going was that we must leave Ascanius behind. If we lingered longer than three days, we would die. If we tried to take him with us, we would die. My time is up by dusk tomorrow. So now you know why I am glad to sit and talk with you, Odysseus. Who knows? When I first saw you, I wondered whether perhaps you too might have been sent by the gods for my aid, but now…’
‘Now what?’
‘After hearing you talk, I cannot believe the Olympians would use as their vessel one who holds them in such low regard.’
‘You might be surprised,’ said the fat Greek. ‘You tried to make contact with this, what did you call her? Calypso?’
‘Of course. My men have roamed in every direction. They’ve found nothing, no sign of life or habitation, hardly any vegetation even. This island is little more than a heap of slippery windswept rocks. I shudder to think what a creature must look like who chooses this for her sacred dwelling place. And as for leaving my boy to her mercy… but what choice will I have? What choice?’
His voice rose into a cry of anguish.
This poor sod’s made for pain, thought Odysseus. Give him a tree nymph, he’d not know whether to climb up her or chop her down.
He said, ‘Tell you what, lad. Why don’t I get a bit of shut-eye, then in the morning when things are looking a little bit brighter, you and me can take a look around to see what we can see?’
Aeneas looked at him with scorn and suspicion.
‘Is that the best the wisest head in the world can offer?’ he mocked. ‘A bit of shut-eye and a look around? What are you really planning, oh wily one? Get your strength back then work out a way to escape?’
‘Nay, lad. I’ve got plenty of strength for that and if I wanted an escape plan, it’s all worked out already,’ said Odysseus. ‘Oops, sorry.’
He’d reached for his goblet and clumsily knocked it over. Aeneas started back from the rivulet of wine which ran towards him and suddenly felt his head dragged back by the hair and a keen edge of metal was drawing a line of warm blood along his exposed throat. Somehow the fat Greek had moved his bulk behind him in the blink of an eye. As to where a man he’d seen naked could have been concealing a knife, Aeneas didn’t care to guess.
‘See? Slit your throat, knock out nursie back there, mebbe even give her a quick bang, then I can be out of this cave so quiet them guards of yours wouldn’t know till they found your body later on. Stroll round to your mooring place, got to be on the windward side of the island, so it shouldn’t be hard to find. Then swim out, help myself to anything small enough for one man to manage, scuttle the rest, and I’m away and free and you don
’t have to worry about making your mind up any more.’
Aeneas closed his eyes in anticipation of the blade biting deeper into his throat.
Then sudden as it had come, the pressure vanished, the grip on his hair was released, and when he opened his eyes, Odysseus was sitting opposite him, regarding him over a full goblet, and saying solicitously, ‘You OK, Prince? Looked like you were having a bit of a funny turn there? Mebbe you should call for help.’
Aeneas’s hand was at his throat. He drew it away and looked down at his fingers, lightly stained with red. Wine not blood. And the same redness marked the sharp thumbnail of the man opposite him.
He looked towards the cave entrance, beyond which he knew that faithful Achates and his armed guard kept watch.
Then he looked at the fat smiling man sitting opposite him and he saw again the fire raging through the temples and palaces of Troy and heard again the shrieks of despair and defeat rising up from the ruins with the billowing smoke.
All down to this fat smiling man.
He smiled back and said, ‘Yes, perhaps I should call for help. What time would you like your morning call?’
End of chapter. Sempernel lay back on the bed and looked thoughtfully at the ceiling. Interesting woman, this Ellie Pascoe. He felt almost sorry that he was probably going to have to put her away. Her involvement might of course turn out to be more coincidental than conspiratorial, but his long experience of looking for connections others had missed had taught him to be very reluctant about admitting accident. After keeping Peter Pascoe firmly in the picture and clearly in his sights after the ‘chance’ encounter with Cornelius on the Snake Pass, he was minded to concede that his involvement might be accidental in every sense, which meant that this family had used up its share of coincidences already.
He scrolled to the next page, eager to read on. But all that came up was:
Chapter 4
Nothing else. Damn. How like a woman to leave a man up in the air. Well, if as was distinctly possible she ended up taking a rest as Her Majesty’s guest, she would have plenty of time to finish it.
There was a tap on the door, which opened before he could call, ‘Come.’
Must have a word with her about that, he thought, looking at the tall, well-made woman with black hair and a strong handsome face, slightly marred by some bruising and scratches down her left cheek, who’d come in.
She said, ‘Word from Wen. That pavilion on the cliff, they call it the Command Post. CP.’
‘How nice to receive confirmation of what one has already intuited. Anything more?’
‘No. Pushed for time.’
‘Let me know soon as you hear anything further from her or Jacobs.’
The woman went but reappeared almost immediately.
‘Car coming,’ she said urgently.
‘Well, go out and meet it, my dear.’
Pascoe, seeing the woman come out of the door as his car bumped down the lane, felt his heart leap, even though simultaneously he realized it wasn’t Ellie. Same build, same colouring, same hairstyle, in fact, similar enough to deceive anyone who knew her only through description or even a fuzzy photo but, even at twice the distance, not a husband who knew intimately and loved passionately every inch of her body…
His mind jerked tardily to a connection he should have made long before.
What was happening to that fine high-flying detective mind which could once leap vast distances to places other minds couldn’t reach? It had taken the Fat Man’s hefty nudge to make him stumble over the similarities between the courtroom watcher and the fake welfare officer. Now, despite Ellie’s description of the woman, and her dream of seeing her doppelgänger get out of the car and head for the front door, key in hand, he had let his anger and shared pain obscure what should have been obvious.
That woman hadn’t come to his house to help abduct Ellie. She had come expecting to find the house empty and to take Ellie’s place.
All this came to him in the seconds it took to pass at speed through the open gate with its ominous sign and slam to a halt, jolting Dalziel and Wield hard forward against their seat belts.
‘Bloody hell, lad, you caught short or what?’ exclaimed the Fat Man as Pascoe flung open the car door and shot out.
The bruising on the woman’s face confirmed his identification.
‘Bitch,’ he said as he pushed by her. ‘I hope you get blood poisoning.’
He went through the front door into the small porch. The sight of a pair of yellow wellies he recognized as Rosie’s on the flagged floor twisted his gut. Then he was through into the living room.
‘Ellie!’ he yelled. ‘Rosie!’
A door opened and a tall, thin, white-haired man with a welcoming smile on his face came towards him, hand outstretched.
‘Mr Pascoe, how nice to meet you ag –’
He was driven against the wall with a crash that dislodged a parade of fine china from the Delft rack.
‘Where’s my wife, you bastard? Where’s my daughter?’
Hitting someone, except in the extremes of self-defence, was never going to be easy for a man of Pascoe’s temperament but he would have done it if his drawn-back fist had not been seized in a grip like a gorilla’s.
‘Easy, lad,’ said Dalziel. ‘Have I taught you nowt? Beating someone round the head’s no way to get information. No, that just knocks them silly. The belly or the bollocks, that’s what gets them talking.’
As he spoke, he drew Pascoe away, their feet scrunching on shards of china, and when he got him into the middle of the room, gently but with irresistible force he lowered him onto a sofa.
‘Right,’ he said. ‘Now you’re sitting comfortable, Mr Sempernel’s going to answer your question, isn’t that right, Mr Sempernel?’
Sempernel slowly straightened up. The assault had clearly shaken him but he was a quick recoverer. A slight adjustment to his tie and shirt front, a hand to his handsome head of white hair, and the reel had been run back to his original entrance, even to the welcoming smile.
He said, ‘Cynthia, my dear, do put that thing away before you do somebody some harm.’
In the doorway the woman was standing uncertainly, a small automatic pistol in her hand. The chances of her doing harm to anyone but herself were slim as Wield had her in an armlock which directed the pistol’s muzzle towards her own left foot.
He relaxed his grip and the woman gave him an unfriendly glance then put the weapon away.
Sempernel said, ‘Now that we’ve both got our violent underlings under control, Mr Dalziel, by all means let’s sit down and talk. I take it from your presence here that you have decided to ignore my request and your superior’s command not to meddle in this affair.’
‘Nay, perish the thought,’ said Dalziel indignantly. ‘We’re just down here on a social trip, see how Ellie and the kiddie are enjoying their bit of a holiday.’
‘In that case, I can set your minds at rest. They seem to be enjoying it very well. They are presently taking supper with Miss Macallum at Gunnery House, which is half a mile or so up the road. Believe me, the only thing likely to sound a note of alarm in their minds and spoil what looks set to be a perfectly delightful evening would be the inexplicable arrival of yourself and your colleagues, looking anxious. I really think it would be best all round if you drove quietly home and left them in our very caring hands.’
Pascoe, his feelings back under tight control, said evenly, ‘No one’s leaving here until you’ve told me exactly what’s going on, Sempernel.’
‘I see. And do you propose following Mr Dalziel’s advice in order to extract this information?’ enquired the tall man courteously. ‘I must say I should find this strange behaviour in one who, by all reports, is reckoned to fit the new user-friendly profile of policing in so many respects that great things are forecast for him.’
‘You really do know how to wrap up a threat, don’t you?’ said Pascoe. ‘But you’re not so good at recognizing when a threat is empty. Yes, Mr
Dalziel’s technique is certainly tempting, but in this instance unnecessary. What I propose is to carry out my duty as a good cop. I have reason for suspecting that your lackey here took part in an attempt to abduct my wife, and reasonable grounds also for suspecting that you were a party to, and therefore fellow conspirator in, this attempt. These are serious offences. I shall arrest you both and take you back to Headquarters for questioning. I shall, of course, radio ahead to give warning of my arrival and it wouldn’t surprise me in the least if our local media hawks who, quite illegally, monitor our radio channels, hear what is happening and are waiting with their cameras when we arrive.’
Sempernel seemed unperturbed.
He raised his eyebrows about two inches higher than Pascoe had ever managed and said, ‘What say you, Superintendent?’
‘Sounds like by the book to me, sir,’ said Dalziel, who’d sunk into an armchair and looked ready to spend the rest of the evening there. ‘Can’t see owt to quarrel with there. That’s how I train my lads to act. By the book.’
Arms and the Women Page 31