Arms and the Women

by Reginald Hill

  He didn’t bother to conceal that this was the merest of sops.

  Pascoe spat it back in his face.

  ‘And I suppose chance has put her in the hands of this bunch of terrorist thugs?’ he sneered. ‘I’d say chance has a face like a knackered horse and white hair, Mr Sempernel.’

  Dalziel felt like applauding. All these years of Pascoe coming across with the manners of a high-class waiter, while all the time he’d been learning how to spit in the soup with the best of them!

  He said, ‘The lad’s right, Gaw. You knew all this, why’d you not do summat about it earlier?’

  ‘Because while we knew a little, there was a lot we were guessing, and some important things we didn’t know at all. Viz, where the arms were hidden. And we still don’t know what happened to Chiquillo or where his sister is. But one mystery has I think been solved.’

  ‘And what’s that?’

  Sempernel turned to look up at the portrait of Mr and Mrs Mungo Macallum.

  Outside the storm suddenly wrapped its arms round the house and tried to drag it out of its foundations. The wind caught the front door, hurled it shut, dragged it open again… shut… open… sending the lurid light of the cloud-smudged sun flickering across the painted figures till it seemed to Pascoe that the man glowered out at them with real hatred, while the woman’s lips curved in a mocking smile.

  ‘Whatever the business relationship of Cornelius and Macallum,’ said Sempernel, ‘it’s quite clear it’s based on a very close blood relationship, wouldn’t you say, gentlemen? In fact, I think I would care to wager that there must be a direct line of descent. Mother and daughter, perhaps? No, the ages do not accord. Grandmother and granddaughter is more likely. What do you think?’

  ‘I think we’re wasting fucking time,’ said Pascoe. ‘For God’s sake, let’s do something!’

  Sempernel regarded him almost pityingly.

  ‘Action is transitory,’ he said. ‘A step, a blow, the motion of a muscle, this way or that. ’Tis done and in the after vacancy, we wonder at ourselves like men betrayed. Never let the strain of inaction alone be your stimulus to action, Mr Pascoe. But I think your wish may after all be my command. What news, my dear?’

  The woman, Cynthia, had come back into the hallway. The sounds of the rising storm had multiplied outside, but the storm within had deafened Pascoe’s ears to mere weather. Now the sight of the woman standing before them like an undine, dripping water to the flagged floor, her black hair enamelled to her skull, her sodden clothes clinging so tight against her body, scarcely any curve or crevice went unmoulded, seemed to him like an irrefutable authentication of the pathetic fallacy.

  ‘Jacobs says there’s movement. Two of them at least heading for the truck.’

  ‘Excellent. This confirms the stuff is here. They must be ready to load. Let’s go and give Jacobs a hand, shall we, gentlemen?’

  He paused in the doorway and looked back.

  ‘Yes, definitely grandmother and granddaughter, I’d say.’

  But no one was listening.

  xv

  bloody glass

  ‘Cornelia is my granddaughter,’ said Feenie Macallum.

  ‘Cornelia?’

  ‘Cornelia Kelly. Known to her friends as Corny, and therefore to some inveterate punsters as Kansas. When she decided her nefarious activities required that she be born again, with singular lack of ingenuity she merely reversed her names and became Kelly Cornelius.’

  The women were sitting on the floor against the wall at one end of the pavilion’s long room. There was nowhere else to sit. The room was devoid of furniture save for a single dilapidated wooden chair which stood in the centre like a symbol of authority. The two Latinos and Popeye had gone clattering down the steps which led from the kitchen into the cellar. Big Ajax and Little Ajax were standing by the window staring out with wonder like a pair of kids at a firework display. Ellie tried not to look out, but from time to time her gaze was drawn irresistibly towards the view. The storm had no rain in it yet and the view through the glass was terrifyingly clear. It was like sitting on a magic carpet hovering a few feet above Hades. What made it worse was that the worst was yet to be. Away to the east, beyond the livid gloom shot through with angry reds and diseased magentas which filled the narrow space between lowering sky and boiling sea, an inexorably advancing wave of darkness was visible. When it got here…

  She dragged her eyes away and said, ‘Feenie, I never knew you’d had a child…’

  ‘No need to sound so surprised. I wasn’t always a dried-up old stick, you know.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean…’

  Feenie laughed and said, ‘Of course you didn’t. In fact, it was almost certainly that chap I was telling you about. I had taken some elementary precautions, but the shock of hearing the German’s voice caused him to explode so violently, everything went. Nine months later I gave birth in a stable. Fortunately it was a girl, otherwise I may have established a cult.’

  Jorge had commanded them to sit down and be quiet. Daphne, who seemed to be nursing a grudge against the Latino quite unbecoming in the daughter of an archdeacon, had ignored him completely as she busied herself making Shirley Novello comfortable. The WDC was now lying with her head on Daphne’s lap. Her eyes were closed and her cheeks pale, but she was breathing naturally. Daphne had demanded water, Jorge had waved his gun (he now had the automatic weapon taken off Kelly Cornelius) and screamed once more that they must remain silent or be shot, Popeye had said very reasonably that there didn’t seem to be much point in requiring the prisoners not to talk when even if they yelled at the top of their voices, there was no one to hear them, and even if there was, they wouldn’t, because of the noise of the storm. Luis had added his support for this viewpoint, a bottle of mineral water had been fetched from the kitchen, and Jorge had subsided with Spanish mutterings and a promissory baring of the teeth at Daphne.

  Then the two Latinos and Popeye had vanished, leaving the women in care of the two Ajaxes.

  It occurred to Ellie that a group of men in similar circumstances would probably by now have elected an escape committee. Her reaction whenever she saw a Colditz movie was, why did these scions of the officer class bother with escape when they were safely out of the war and living in conditions which, though not ideal, weren’t much worse than those prevailing in many of the boarding schools they sent their kids to?

  She recognized now that she might have to moderate her position slightly, but for the moment there didn’t seem much point in starting to dig a tunnel or build a glider, so instead she’d turned her attention to the young woman who’d almost rescued them.

  On learning her identity, she recalled a certain mildly suspicious languor which had modified Pascoe’s manner whenever Kelly Cornelius was mentioned. Now she saw why. But any jealous pang she might have felt was soon subsumed by the interest of establishing the link between her and Feenie. As an unpublished author, she knew a great story when she heard one. Also, anything which took her mind off here and now was very welcome.

  ‘So what happened?’ she demanded eagerly. ‘I mean, having a child behind enemy lines in the middle of a war! It’s incredible.’

  ‘I could tell you things far more incredible,’ said Feenie shortly. ‘I nursed her for a couple of weeks till my friends found a family who could take her in.’

  ‘You mean, you left her?’ She tried not to sound shocked.

  ‘There was a war on. I had work to do. If I’d got caught, I would certainly have been tortured and shot. Not much future for a child in those circumstances.’

  ‘And after the war?’

  ‘After the war, she was behind the Iron Curtain. I used to go to see her. Fortunately I had some standing with the authorities there, but they refused to let her out. What could I offer her in the decadent west which she was not already enjoying far more abundantly where she was?’

  It wasn’t quite clear if she was quoting straight or ironically.

  ‘Did your fat
her know about her?’ asked Ellie.

  ‘I told him eventually.’

  ‘How did he react?’

  Feenie was silent for a while and when she answered her voice had an unfamiliar overtone of regret.

  ‘Badly. But that was my intention. Our relationship was degenerating fast by then and I told him merely to provoke him. I let him believe I’d abandoned her there deliberately because I did not want her to be brought up in England. I told him she would never learn anything from me about her grandfather, she would never even know he existed. It was cruel. I meant it to be. I thought he deserved it. Well, we learn what a rough measure desert is when it’s meted out to ourselves.’

  ‘She means she got me,’ said her granddaughter, smiling at the old woman affectionately. ‘I’m a terrible trial to her.’

  Wendy Woolley, who’d been busying herself with what looked to Ellie like a hussively obsessive tidying-up of the medicine chest, said unexpectedly, ‘Why? Because you’re a common criminal?’

  Kelly laughed, a melodious chortle which rippled through her body in a way which Ellie guessed made men eager to set her laughing.

  ‘Not the common bit. Gran doesn’t object to a little necessary illegality in a good cause, but she draws a rather old-fashioned line.’

  Feenie came back in as if she didn’t much care for this line of development.

  ‘My father died shortly thereafter, so he never met his granddaughter. He would have done, you see, as I was very close to getting her out by then. But by the time I managed it, he was gone. His death meant I had the money to see that my daughter got a good education. We were never close, too much time had passed for that. But we kept in touch and saw each other from time to time. I think in the end I got her understanding.’

  ‘You got her respect, Gran,’ said Kelly gently. ‘And if you had pressed, you could have had her love.’

  ‘Perhaps. But there was no time for that,’ said the old woman with a harshness which didn’t quite hide her pain.

  All the love that she withheld from her daughter she has lavished on Kelly, thought Ellie, feeling slightly ashamed that in these circumstances what she regretted most was not having a recorder.

  ‘And your father?’ she said to the young woman. ‘Irish?’

  ‘South American-Irish,’ she said. ‘Juan Antonio Kelly. Not that nationality meant too much to him, as long as the causes were right. He was a great man for causes, which I suppose was why he married Mama. She had causes in her blood too. Must be in the genes. I sometimes think I could have done without that particular inheritance. Causes can really get in the way of having a good time, can’t they?’

  She smiled at Ellie as if detecting a possible ally. But it wasn’t tea and sympathy all round.

  ‘Excuse me,’ said Wendy Woolley with the determination of the timidly righteous. ‘You are the woman I’ve read about who’s accused of embezzling the money from Nortrust? What kind of cause was involved there, please?’

  She’s well-informed. Must read papers I don’t see, thought Ellie, who’d been surprised how little news coverage there’d been even locally about Cornelius.

  ‘The best,’ said Kelly, smiling affectionately at her grandmother. ‘Love. Is there a better cause?’

  ‘So you were in on it too, were you, Miss Macallum?’ said Wendy in a tone of shock and disapproval.

  Feenie looked at her with surprise not so much at the question as at its source.

  ‘Against my better judgement, but needs must when the devil drives.’

  ‘But Feenie, why?’ demanded Ellie. ‘For Liberata, was it?’

  ‘For Liberata and all my other activities,’ said Feenie wearily. ‘So much to do, so little money left to do it with. As you could see up at the house, I’m pretty near the end of my realizable assets. I have so many commitments, so many promises to keep.’

  Daphne, who’d been listening with growing disbelief, let out a snort of indignation.

  ‘So you decided that what you do is so important you could steal other people’s money?’ she sneered. ‘Well, well. How terribly highly you must value yourself, Miss Macallum. Below St Francis but above Mother Teresa, would that be about right?’

  Feenie took this with a faint smile, but Kelly turned angrily on Daphne.

  ‘What do you know about anything? Who the hell are you anyway, with your snooty accent and hundred-quid hairdo?’

  ‘Takes a one to know a one,’ said Daphne with spirit. ‘As to who I am, among other things, I’m a customer of the Nortrust Bank, so I suppose I’m one of the victims you and your grandmother have been robbing.’

  ‘No, there aren’t any victims. The bank owed my grandmother that money,’ retorted Kelly.

  ‘It’s all right, dear,’ said Feenie.

  ‘No, they can say what they like about me but not about you,’ said Kelly. ‘So listen in, Miss Twinset and Pearls, but be careful. I may shock you so much you’ll mess your silk drawers. I move money around for certain groups in South America. Dirty money, you’d call it. But it’s dirty work these groups have to do, a bit like your housemaid cleaning your grate.’

  ‘For someone who looks so young, you really are awfully dated, my dear,’ murmured Daphne. ‘But do get on with your interesting exposition.’

  ‘One good route for cleaning it up is to pass it through a charitable organization. I’ve always been interested in Liberata, as a cause, I mean. In fact, I’ve used my South American contacts to get the names of women Liberata could help, sometimes women I knew personally, and I’ve passed them on to my grandmother. So naturally I thought of using its account in one of my laundry operations. I say naturally because something always gets left behind and I’d have seen to it that Liberata got a real benefit. Only there was a problem. Some of the organizations I act for have their financial basis in the cocaine industry. Sometimes it’s used directly instead of currency, but mostly it has to be sold to get the money to buy whatever’s necessary to keep the struggle going. And that’s the money which needs to be cleaned up.’

  ‘Cleaned up? You could shovel it into a furnace and the ashes would still stink!’ interrupted Daphne.

  ‘Hey, I’m surprised you don’t get on better with Gran,’ said Kelly. ‘That’s the way she thinks. She wanted nothing to do with my little proposal. In fact, we had a serious falling-out. I felt I’d disappointed her and I wanted to make it up to her. Then I saw the Nortrust Bank advertising for a systems expert and suddenly I saw the way. You see, I knew they owed her.’

  ‘Ollershaw. George Ollershaw.’

  The words were spoken so softly it took a moment to trace them to their source.

  It was Shirley Novello, face still pale as death, eyes hardly open, lips hardly moving. But nothing the matter with her ears. Good cop. Always working. Peter will be pleased, thought Ellie.

  ‘Right,’ said Kelly. ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘Financial adviser…ran him off the road…could’ve killed him. I saw the file. Should have made the connection…’

  Suddenly Ellie did make a connection – between the skimpy pants she’d found at Nosebleed and Cornelius. Feenie must have had to get her out in a hurry when Mrs Stonelady told her Daphne and friends were on their way. Presumably Feenie had informed her granddaughter there was a cop, and a cop’s wife, in the party.

  So why was Kelly talking so freely?

  The good answer was because she was confident of being long gone before Novello was in a fit state to use any of it against her.

  The bad answer was because she didn’t have much hope that any of them would be in a fit state for anything when this came to its end.

  How close was that end? From time to time there were noises beneath them. Popeye, Jorge and Luis down in the cellar, she presumed. When they returned…

  Look on the bright side. Every time she thought about Rosie wandering around alone in the increasingly wild weather, her stomach churned. She longed to see her, hold her, comfort her. But if she’d been given the power t
o transport her to her side, she knew it would have been an act of huge selfishness to use it. The blacker things looked in here, the better off Rosie was at the mercy of nothing worse than wind and rain.

  And that was the bright side!

  She shook these thoughts out of her mind and said, ‘Feenie? Is this true?’

  ‘Not in law, maybe, but I was certainly cheated out of money by Ollershaw, and Nortrust ultimately benefited. So yes, I felt entitled.’

  ‘Could you explain that for the benefit of us poor citizens who are bound by more conventional notions of legality?’ said Daphne sweetly.

  Ellie recalled some of the doubts she knew Peter still had about Patrick Aldermann and wondered if any of them had ever impinged on Daphne’s consciousness. You could know a lot about people, but there were always no-go areas.

  Feenie gave a succinct account of her dealings with George Ollershaw, concluding, ‘So that’s the story, Mrs Aldermann. You must decide for yourself if I had a grievance.’

  Daphne, who would hold up long supermarket queues to dispute a possible ten-pence overcharge, nodded vigorously and said, ‘I should think you had! You say you ran him off the road? You should have waited till he got out of his car and finished the job!’

  ‘That wouldn’t have got Gran’s money back,’ said Kelly. ‘My plan did. I worked out that Ollershaw’s little fiddle had done Gran out of at least three million pounds, including interest, and that’s the amount I took Nortrust for. And I left all lines leading back to dear old George. The more they dig, the worse it’s going to look for him. The only way he’s going to keep out of jail is by paying it back out of his own personal savings.’

  ‘Bravo,’ said Daphne, completely converted. ‘And the three million, I take it, is somehow going to end in Liberata’s account as a genuine charitable donation?’