Deadheads dap-7

by Reginald Hill

  'Hello, love,' he said. 'This is a nice surprise. How'd you know I was here?'

  'Patrick was talking to Eric Quayle on the phone last night. He said you'd reached an agreement with the unions and that you'd be relaxing down here today.'

  'Talking to Quayle, was he?'

  With himself out of the office, it would be a good opportunity for them to arrange a meeting and plan tactics. Elgood felt he could afford to smile at the thought. Each of them imagining he was using the other! And both doomed to get nowhere! The board meeting at which the question of the new financial director would be resolved was only a week away. Elgood was pretty certain that, with his authority confirmed by the successful cut-back negotiations, he could now face down Quayle, but he was taking no chances. Yesterday he had made a phone call to London and put into action another little scheme which with a bit of luck would give him enough ammunition to shoot down Aldermann's nomination once and for all.

  'And you decided that a touch of sunshine and old Dick was just what the doctor ordered?' he went on. 'Grand. I'm glad you've come.'

  He took her hand, ready to draw her towards him if the moment felt ripe. But those powers of empathy which were the basis of his amorous success, and which functioned even when he was physically most aroused, told him she wasn't ready, so holding her hand lightly in his, he set off for the cottage, saying, 'Let's have a coffee and plan our day. How long can you stay?'

  She didn't answer and Elgood chattered on amiably as they clambered up over the chunks of eroded rock and earth which formed a rough flight of steps to the cliff top. Once there he paused by the white-painted stake which he drove into the ground every spring to measure the winter's deprivation. Sometimes he had had to move it a couple of yards or more, sometimes only a couple of feet. Only once in twenty years had it remained still.

  Daphne said, 'Doesn't it bother you, that stick? Watching it tap-tap-tapping towards you like a blind man's cane year after year?'

  Elgood laughed and said, 'That's a bit fanciful, isn't it, love? Not to say morbid!'

  'I'm sorry,' said Daphne, it was just the thought of the sea burrowing away underneath. It suddenly seemed so sinister.'

  'Sinister? Well, mebbe it's different for me, being a miner's son brought up in a mining village where at any hour day or night you knew there was someone down there, burrowing away beneath your feet; not the sea, mark you, but your dad mebbe, or your brother, or your best mate; someone, any road, you knew by name. So it doesn't bother me. In fact, it pleases me being able to sit in the cottage odd times in the winter, listening to the burrowing and sometimes hearing a great rending and a crashing as the earth falls, and knowing it's only the old sea down there, not me dad, or me brother, or me best mate, nor any poor devil I know by name.'

  'Yes, I can see that,' said Daphne earnestly. 'It's just that it's so pretty here, but so impermanent.'

  'Not like your husband's precious Rosemont, you mean? Not even Rosemont will last for ever! There's worms down there, and moles; mice and rats too, I shouldn't wonder; all manner of burrowing creatures. And where they burrow was once level ground too, do you ever think of that? Miners know that. Shapes of leaves they find, and shells, and bones, and footsteps too, printed in the very rock half a mile under the earth. Slow change like that makes a man feel like nowt, his existence like the width of an eyelash. Now, if the old sea gets to the cottage before Old Nick gets to me, that'll make me feel I can live forever!'

  Daphne smiled and said, 'And you accuse me of being fanciful!'

  Elgood, his verbal tonic having done the hoped-for trick of relaxing his visitor, said, 'Let's go in and get that coffee.'

  Once inside, he dispatched Daphne to the small kitchen while he got dressed. For his age, he knew he was well preserved. In athletic motion such as swimming, or in the sultry build-up to - or the torpid wind-down from - the act of love he was happy to stand examination. But however well preserved his body, at sixty, he was not prepared to let it be a still target for the cool appraisal of an uncommitted woman's eyes.

  And Daphne, he guessed, was now uncommitted. In fact, he doubted if she'd ever been anything else.

  Her first words as she brought the tray of coffee into the simply but comfortably furnished living-room confirmed this without ambiguity.

  'Dick, I wanted to tell you that it's over between us.'

  'Oh yes,' said Elgood. A postcard would have done as well, he thought. One of his rules was never to resist a woman who said she wanted to finish. Either she meant it, in which case resistance would be foolish. Or she didn't mean it, in which case resistance would be what she wanted and therefore insane.

  So he said easily, 'Well, drink your coffee, love, and here's a toast. To friendship. We had a good day and hurt no one. So no need for guilt or recriminations.'

  He smiled at her over his coffee cup, and wished her long gone. Hard experience in the past had taught him that the most unexpected successes often turned out to be the most troublesome. His success with Daphne Aldermann had been one of the most unexpected he had ever known.

  He had met her shortly after Aldermann had joined the firm as part-time assistant to that awkward bugger, Chris Burke. It had been an act of charitable patronage for old time's sake. And chatting up the wife had been an act of instinct for the sake of keeping his hand in. His instinct also marked her down as a non-starter, but he didn't know how not to try.

  It had been second nature to him to hint in a manner so subtle as to be easily deniable that Daphne's beauty as much as Aldermann's deserts had won him Burke's job. And again as he stood in a corner with her at the bunfight after Timothy Eagles's funeral, even though by now the battle of the Board was well under way, he had not been able to resist hinting that Aldermann's permanent elevation to the Chief Accountant's job might well depend on Daphne's bonny blue eyes. This was the mere rhetoric of flirtation, artificial and hollow. But to his surprise there was a response, or rather a reaction, for later he doubted if she really paid much heed to his amorous hints at that time. But she certainly reacted to the mention of jobs and salaries. She had something on her mind. Suddenly businesslike, he had suggested that perhaps here at a funeral feast was not the place to talk. They had met for a lunch-time drink a couple of days later, and again the following week. The atmosphere remained businesslike with an undertone of honest friendship. Elgood had been uneasy because uncertain. Part of him saw the meetings as a means of getting inside information on Aldermann's unsteady finances which might be useful in the forthcoming battle. Part of him saw these meetings as erotic foreplay. And another part, whose location he had not been able to discover, had taken to waking him in the night and telling him his behaviour was indecent, immoral and squalid.

  So he had tried to tell her at their last lunch-time meeting that her husband had the Chief Accountant's job simply because he was there, not because Elgood wanted him to have it, and that he personally was doing all he could to stop him getting on the Board. And later that same Friday afternoon he had the same kind of clarification session with Aldermann, ending with those suggestive words,Over my dead body!

  That had to be that, he thought. It had come as a complete surprise when, on the Sunday afternoon, Daphne had rung him in a state of some agitation, wanting to talk. He'd been planning to go down to the cottage the following morning to compensate for a weekend largely given over to company matters. He had suggested they meet in the car park and drive down together. She had hesitated, then finally agreed. He hadn't really been certain she would turn up until the moment she climbed into his car with the look of an apprentice spy.

  They talked generally on the drive down. She was no longer certain why she had come, and he could see that. He didn't push, just let her talk. He showed her round the cottage, then they walked on the beach. The sky was overcast, the water a still grey. A straightforward seduction scenario would have had Elgood suggesting a nude swim, but today the script was still unwritten. He heard with puzzlement that Aldermann still seemed com
pletely optimistic about his future. In a strange way, his presence was with them; his certainties, his placidity, his contentment moved with the gigantic understrength of the quiet sea against which their own doubts and worries and dismays, no matter how large and solid they seemed, stood with only the delusory resistance of the soft-stoned cliff.

  Before midday, Elgood suggested they ate. Talk had sputtered out, they needed something to do. There was cold chicken and salad and white wine. They ate little, drank a lot. He didn't set out to get her drunk, he prided himself he had never needed that, and he stopped topping up her glass while she was still well this side of inebriety. But she was more relaxed than she had been since arriving. There was still tension there, he felt as he took her in his arms, but it was the tension of resolve, the nervous novice knowing she can do her duty.

  They made love. It hadn't been great but it had been promising. There was a deep sensuality there waiting to be tapped, and afterwards they drank brandy together, she chattering away in the reaction of release, he content to wait quietly for his strength to return so that he could really sample the goods he had just begun to unwrap.

  Outside a wind had blown up off the sea. A rambling rose, sadly neglected and full of insect life, grew up the side wall of the cottage and the strong gusts set it tapping against the window. Daphne stopped talking and let out a startled little cry.

  'What's up?' asked Elgood.

  'Nothing. Just the noise,' she said tremulously. 'For a moment I thought it might be Patrick!'

  'Disguised as a rose-bush? Aye, that'd be just about what I'd expect,' mocked Elgood.

  'Why do you say that?'

  'Well, he's a bit obsessed, isn't he? He's got more rose catalogues than company records in his filing cabinet, so they say.'

  He hadn't meant to start talking about Patrick again. Absent husbands held a very low place in his list of post-coital topics.

  'Obsessed? No, I don't think that's the word,' said Daphne, frowning. 'He loves his garden and he loves the house, but I don't think he'd ever put them before the children, or before me either.'

  Elgood didn't like the way the conversation was turning.

  He said, 'But surely the way he's poured all the money you've ever had into Rosemont . . .'

  'And us, too,' corrected Daphne. 'Neither the children nor I have ever wanted for anything. So it's not obsessive, it's just rather uncanny, this certainty of his that everything will be all right, that nothing will ever be allowed to threaten Rosemont . . .'

  'Uncanny, then,' said Elgood, feeling himself almost ready for the second course, and wanting to be shot of this unseemly topic. 'All right, he's got magical powers protecting his fairy castle. Another drop of brandy, love?'

  'No, thanks. Yes, it does sometimes seem like that, doesn't it? I mean, he's always said "don't worry," and I've always worried, and yet he's always turned out to be right. Obstacles just seem to get out of his way. I mean, four years ago he hadn't even got a job after he finished with Capstick's and look where he is now without hardly any effort. It's hardly surprising he can still be so sure of getting on the Board, even though you say not, is it?'

  There was no guile in her tone, nothing but an honest desire to understand her husband, yet Elgood felt it not only as an atmospheric intrusion, but as a threat. For some reason the memory of the desk lamp came into his mind. He caressed Daphne's breast, massaging the nipple between finger and thumb, but the gesture did as little for him as it seemed to be doing for her and when a little while later she said she ought to be getting ready to leave now if she were to be in time to pick up her daughter from school, he made no protest.

  He had dropped her back at the car-park entrance, driven back to the office, sat and looked at the desk lamp, finally laughed at his foolishness and got down to some work. Later he had driven to his flat and put the car in the garage without any difficulty. He had passed a rather restless night, full of menacing dreams in which Bulmer and Eagles figured large. But a good breakfast had seemed to put him right.

  Then he had descended to his garage, tugged at the up-and-over door which could normally be moved by a little finger's pressure, jerked at it when it appeared to be stuck, and next moment was flinging himself backwards as the whole heavy structure came crashing down.

  Well, perhaps he had overreacted. But it was understandable. And all was well that ended well. He was back in charge now. Indeed things were so normal that he found himself inwardly assessing the chances of persuading Daphne to have one for the road.

  Down boy! he warned himself. That was the way to trouble. And in any case, he doubted if she were the type. Her next words confirmed this.

  'I'm not really cut out for this kind of thing,' she said. 'I had to see you face to face to make sure you understood. It's just not my cup of tea. I was in real agony when the police came round to ask questions about my car. I kept on remembering those boys hanging around the car park and wondering if they'd remember seeing me there.'

  'Like I told you when you rang,' said Elgood easily, 'they likely didn't even notice. And if they were the ones as did the scratching, they're not going to volunteer to chat with the cops, are they? In any case, it was just a bit of vandalization, hardly the crime of the century!'

  'But they did send that ugly CID man round to see me,' objected Daphne.

  Elgood couldn't contradict this except by telling her what he imagined the real reason for this visit had been. That was an embarrassment he was glad to be able to avoid.

  'That's true. Time on their hands, these bobbies,' he said. 'Have you time for another coffee? Or a drink, mebbe?'

  As hoped, this provoked her to shake her head and rise.

  'No, really. I must be getting back.'

  'Right,' he said. 'Still friends?'

  'Of course.'

  He kissed her lightly on the cheek.

  She smiled and said, it's silly, but I feel so happy I’ve seen you and made things clear. It's like coming out of the dentist's.'

  'I've been called a lot of things,' he said, 'but rarely a dentist.'

  'I'm sorry. I didn't mean . . . it's just that I let things get inside my mind sometimes and rattle round in there and worry myself into the most absurd ideas! You know, just recently I met this woman, purely by chance, and it turned out she was a policeman's wife. I like her a lot, she's bright and straightforward, and completely independent, of her husband I mean. And yet the other night I woke up at four A.M. suddenly completely convinced she'd been set on me to spy for the police force! I hate those four o'clock horrors, don't you? That's another thing about Patrick, he never has them. Of course, came the dawn, and I could see what a fool I'd been. But that's the way I've been going on lately, like some neurotic!'

  This burst of relieved chatter had got them out of the cottage.

  'Have you mentioned your new friend to Patrick?' asked Elgood casually as he opened the car door.

  'Oh yes. The other night. I didn't know how he'd react, especially as when I met her she was protesting against the school that Diana goes to. But you know Patrick. Nothing bothers him. He just suggested I should invite her and her husband round for dinner one night.'

  'I'd be careful about inviting the fuzz into my house,' said Elgood only half jokingly. 'What did you say her name was?'

  Daphne told him.

  To her horror, Elgood put his hands to his face and leaned against the car with a long, low groan.

  'What's the matter?' she cried in alarm. Most of her alarm was for Elgood who she feared was having a heart-attack. But there was a little bit left over for herself as her mind raced ahead to the possible consequences.

  She put her arm round his shoulders. He moved his hands away from his face, revealing to her relief and also her puzzlement the pains not of disease but of simple dismay.

  'What's the matter, Dick?' she demanded. 'Are you all right?'

  'I wish I knew,' he said.

  He looked at her for a couple of seconds, sighed, took her hand in his a
nd said, 'You'd best come back into the cottage. I've got something to tell you. But first of all, you'd better tell me everything you know about this Mrs Ellie Pascoe.'

  2

  MEMORIAM

  (Hybrid Tea. Dates from 1960, - white bedding rose, sad in the rain.)

  Wednesday for Pascoe started with the dead.

  Tuesday had finished with Dalziel. Pascoe wasn't sure which he preferred.

  The fat man had rung shortly after five o'clock. He had listened in silence to Pascoe's description of his interrogation of the two boys. His reaction to the news about Elgood and Daphne Aldermann was almost dismissive.

  'It doesn't surprise me,' he said. 'If they put him into intensive care, he'd likely ask for a double-bed. Gives Aldermann a good motive, though. And it begins to make it a bit clearer why Dick got so bloody neurotic about Aldermann.'

  'Well, it surprised me,' said Pascoe. 'Ellie's got to know Daphne Aldermann quite well and she doesn't sound the type for a quick hump. You don't think it could be serious between her and Elgood, could it? That might explain a few things.

  ‘If it is, then Dick doesn't know about it,' said Dalziel emphatically. 'Elgood's only serious about himself. He got frightened for some reason and he wanted reassurance, about the desk-lamp, and about the garage door, and about them two fellows that died. He couldn't go through the coroners' reports himself, could he? Is your missus seeing the Aldermann woman again? She's a sharp lass, your Ellie, even if she does get some daft notions sometimes. Ask her to see what she can winkle out.'