Exit Lines

by Reginald Hill

  ‘That’s right,’ said Kassell. ‘I’ve developed an eye for that if nothing else. Too much booze and shotguns don’t mix. The biggest proportion of accidents happen during the after-lunch drives.’

  Kassell looked very much at home in this environment, his face healthily flushed by the boisterous wind which winnowed his hair as though to show how thick it still was. His clothing, though it lacked the evident newness of the guests’, gave away nothing in terms of cut and fit.

  ‘Do you get a lot of accidents, then?’ asked Dalziel, chewing voraciously at a cold leg of something.

  ‘Not here we don’t,’ said Kassell. ‘But on some of the estates where they let out shooting to syndicates, you can get too many clowns and not enough ringmasters. Result is, often they shoot more dogs than birds.’

  ‘This your first time, Andy?’ said Pledger.

  ‘That’s right. I said to Barney I fancied giving it a go and he said I should try half a day to see how I liked it. It’s good of you to let me come.’

  ‘Always happy to have the law along,’ said Pledger. ‘Old Tommy Winter’s a fair shot, as you probably know. I bet he’d rather be here than burning up on some Caribbean beach. And we usually have one or two of the boys in blue at the other end of the stick too.’

  ‘Sorry?’ said Dalziel.

  ‘The beaters,’ explained Kassell. ‘Of course we can get any amount of casual labour these days, but we like to stick with what we know and can rely on. We get a lot of bobbies using their day off to earn a bit extra. I suppose it’s against regulations, is it?’

  He smiled faintly as he asked the question.

  Dalziel said, ‘If it doesn’t bother Old Tommy, it don’t bother me.’

  ‘Old Tommy’ was of course the Chief Constable, who was as unlikely to be addressed to his face in this fashion by Dalziel as he was to address Dalziel as ‘Young Andy’.

  ‘Well, I’d better make with the Euro-talk,’ said Pledger cheerfully. ‘Good shooting, Andy. Barney will keep an eye on you, I’ve no doubt. Shall we see you at dinner tonight?’

  ‘I don’t think so, Sir William,’ said Dalziel. ‘I’ve just come as I am.’

  ‘Pity,’ said Pledger. ‘Look, if you take to it, you really ought to come again soon, but kitted out for a meal too. I mean, that’s the fun of it, isn’t it? Not standing around here with the wind whistling among the family jewels, but yakking about it later with your belly full and a noggin in your hand. Barney, you’re the only sod who knows what’s what. When would be best?’

  ‘Next Friday would suit very well. We’re usually a gun or two short on the first afternoon. This lot go back tomorrow. Next bunch arrives on Friday morning, and there’s always at least one of the Euros who just wants to lie around after his flight.’

  ‘Splendid,’ said Pledger. ‘Isn’t de Witt coming? He’s a Dutch judge, Andy, fascinated by crime. He’d love to meet an English bobby, I know. So that’s fixed. Good. Always supposing you don’t blow someone’s head off this afternoon!’

  ‘Thank you very much,’ said Dalziel.

  Pledger moved away and Kassell said with the same faint smile as before, ‘You’ve made a hit.’

  ‘You think so? I wouldn’t know. Not much to hit by the looks of it,’ said Dalziel with the amiable condescension of the large.

  ‘Half of his success derives from no one being able to believe in him, till it’s too late,’ said Kassell. ‘He could gobble most of this lot up for afternoon tea.’

  ‘And judges? Does he gobble up judges too?’

  ‘The Dutchman, you mean? Rest easy. It’s just a question of a patent that’s being sorted out in a civil court, that’s all. Let’s take a stroll, shall we? I have to talk to the beaters.’

  They set off together out of the ruins. It was a fine landscape of lightly wooded moorlands rolling like the sea under the boisterous wind which trailed lines of white clouds across a huge sky.

  ‘How was it at the airport?’ asked Dalziel.

  ‘All right,’ said Kassell. ‘How’s your bit of bother?’

  ‘Oh, it’ll be all right,’ said Dalziel. ‘Especially now I’ve got respectable military gents speaking up for me. Thanks for telling Headingley you saw me and Arnie driving off, by the way.’

  ‘I’d hate to see your career messed up unnecessarily,’ said Kassell sincerely. ‘Now, next Friday, how will it be?’

  ‘You mean, my visit to the Grange?’ asked Dalziel innocently.

  ‘Partly. I hope it goes well. I hope our other visitors enjoy themselves too and aren’t inconvenienced by any delays on arrival. This holiday of yours, will it keep you out of contact with things?’

  ‘No,’ said Dalziel. ‘I’ll drift in from time to time and suss out what’s what. Thursday do you?’

  ‘Fine,’ said Kassell. ‘Ah, here we are. The workers.’

  In a fold of land, out of view of the ruin, the beaters were enjoying their lunch. Their leader approached touching his cap and saying, ‘’Afternoon, Major.’

  Dalziel strolled aside to let the consultation take its course. Strange world, he thought. This lot and the tweedy set back there would spend their day under the same sky, tramping across the same bit of ground. But it was us and them; this lot working, that lot playing; this lot at the end of the day going home with a few quid in their pockets, that lot going home with twenty times as much out of their bank balance – or someone’s bank balance. What did it all signify?

  Suddenly his mind was directed from long-term speculation to short-term bewilderment. There were several large stones scattered around this hollow which some of the men used as seats, some as tables. Behind one of these stones some odd life-form was crouching in a vain effort at concealment. His first thought was that someone had brought a pet orangutan along. But then he realized that the apparently squat and shambling outline was delusory, and recognition came.

  ‘Hector!’ he said. ‘It’s never you?’

  Slowly the figure unfolded itself, stretching to its full length: Constable Hector in a lumberjack’s jacket, blue jeans and constabulary boots.

  ‘It’s my day off, sir,’ he said with tremulous bravado.

  ‘The Force’s loss is Sir William’s gain,’ said Dalziel. ‘I’ve no doubt you’re doing a grand job. You’ve got just the right figure for frightening birds.’

  ‘You mean it’s all right, sir?’ said Hector hopefully.

  ‘Never quote me on it, lad,’ said Dalziel. ‘But I suppose it’s a form of good police training; advancing courageously on a line of armed men intent on shooting you down.’

  He turned away, but Hector, slightly puzzled, said, ‘Sir, it’s the birds the gentlemen shoot down, not us.’

  And Dalziel turned back with an expression of ferocious glee.

  ‘I shouldn’t bet on it, lad. Not today, I shouldn’t bet on it!’

  Chapter 18

  ‘Thy necessity is yet greater than mine.’

  ‘That’s right. That’s right,’ said Provost Sergeant Myers. ‘Old ammunition boot went out in the early ‘sixties. It’s all the one-piece moulded now. Only sods who still use studs are those poncy Guards who like to do a lot of stamping around.’

  ‘So this could be a print from a modern Army boot?’ asked Pascoe, hot for certainties.

  ‘Could be a print from a modern fucking art exhibition,’ said Myers, looking at the smudgy pattern. ‘Here. Take a look at mine, take a look at mine.’

  He banged his left foot on to the low trestletable so that Pascoe could make comparison with his sole.

  There had been a sense of déjá vu when Pascoe was ushered into the guard room. The sergeant was in the same chair by the same glowing stove with Corporal Price and Lance Corporal Gillott apparently drinking the same cups of tea. Pascoe’s intention had been to contact the helpful Sergeant Ludlam, but his sense of enclosure, not helped by the suspicious reluctance of the young RP on gate duty to admit him at all, had made him eager to get his business over with as quickly as possible. The trio of
NCO’s didn’t exactly make him welcome but Myers at least seemed disposed to take a professional interest in his query.

  ‘Could be the same,’ said Pascoe hopefully. ‘Would you mind giving us a print for comparison?’

  Myers didn’t mind and Pascoe, who’d taken the precaution of bringing along a blank sheet of card and some blacking ink, got to work. The sharp outline so produced could by a stretch, or rather by a smudge, have been the same as the pattern indented into Bob Deeks’s vinyl, Corporal Price was confident it was, Sergeant Myers was sceptical and Lance-Corporal Gillott refused to be drawn. The debate, such as it was, was interrupted by the arrival of the orderly officer, a young second-lieutenant who seemed inclined to regard Pascoe as the Forlorn Hope of some terrorist raiding party. Pascoe civilly produced his credentials, but finding himself then treated with the condescension a village squire might offer a village bobby, he became Dalzielish and said, ‘Look, laddie, it’s getting near my lunch-time. I’d really love to stay and share your rusks, but I ought to be getting back to the grown-up world.’ The officer withdrew, nonplussed and offended, and Sergeant Myers regarded Pascoe with a new respect.

  ‘Sorry about him,’ he offered. ‘He’s young. Not licked into shape yet. They’re not all like that, the officers.’

  ‘I’ve only met him and Captain Trott,’ said Pascoe. ‘Though I did come across one of your former officers recently. Major Kassell.’

  ‘Oh yes. The Major,’ said Myers.

  There was something in the way he spoke that caught Pascoe’s attention. Quickly deciding that Myers was the kind of soldier who would clam up if directly invited to gossip about the regiment with an outsider, he opted for provocation.

  ‘You remember him?’ he said. ‘He seems to have done all right for himself. Of course, he had the sense to get out and make it in civvy street, didn’t he?’

  He intended merely to be slightly rude about the Army but by chance the button he pressed won him a jackpot.

  ‘The sense to get out? The sense to get out?’ said Myers angrily. ‘Doesn’t take much fucking sense when the choice is to be court-martialled, does it? At least he had the choice, which is more than others did, you want to ask Dave Ludlam about that, oh yes, you want to ask Ludlam!’

  ‘Yes,’ said Pascoe, his mind racing. ‘The other day, I got a hint; same business, was it?’

  ‘The very same. CSM he was then, would’ve been RSM by now, no doubt. Well, if you’re daft enough to get caught, that’s your bad luck, that’s what I tell these lads with their hard luck stories, that’s your bad luck. But it should be one law for all, wouldn’t you say? One law for all.’

  ‘Indeed yes,’ said Pascoe cautiously. ‘I dare say there was a lot of it going on?’

  ‘Out in Hong Kong?’ said Myers incredulously. ‘Never known a place like it. Everyone had a fucking racket, from the police down. Keeping out of the rackets was harder than getting in! What’s a few more Chinks, anyway? Place bursting at the seams with them, what’s a few more? That’s how Dave Ludlam saw it. But it’s not right that the same thing as turns a CSM into a private and gets him stuck in the glasshouse should leave a major a major and get him a nice cushy billet in civvy street!’

  There was no more. Myers’s indignation had taken him as far as he was going. Pascoe drove back to town so rapt in speculation that his doubtfully motivated half-plan to stop for a lunch-time drink at Paradise Hall was completely forgotten.

  Dennis Seymour was a pragmatist. An ambitious young man, if he could have impressed Pascoe by performing his appointed tasks and returning with his report in half an hour, he would have done so. But when on learning at Starbuck’s restaurant where Tap Parrinder had enjoyed his last meal that the waitress who probably served him wouldn’t be on duty till noon, he happily accepted this set-back as an excuse to return and eat there. Meanwhile he went down to the off-licence which was situated only a couple of hundred yards away from the store.

  Here he was more lucky. The man in charge recalled Parrinder well.

  ‘Old boy, cheerful sort. I said something about the terrible weather and he laughed and said he didn’t mind. No, what he said was the going suited him fine, like he was a horse, if you see what I mean. I said it takes all sorts, and he bought a half of rum. I had some of our own brand on offer, but he said no, he’d prefer the very best, bugger the expense!’

  ‘What time was this?’ asked Seymour.

  ‘About a quarter past, half past six.’

  ‘You’re sure?’

  ‘Real sure. He was just about the only customer I’d had in hours. Friday’s usually the big shopping day, but that weather kept them at home till Saturday last week. What’s up, anyway? Nothing wrong with the old chap, is there?’

  ‘He had a fall,’ said Seymour.

  ‘Poor old devil!’

  ‘Yes,’ said Seymour. ‘Do you remember how he paid?’

  ‘Yes. He gave me a fiver, I think. That’s it. Definitely a fiver.’

  ‘Did he take it out of a wallet? or a purse? or what?’

  ‘I don’t rightly know. Well, I didn’t see, did I? He sort of half turned away to get his money out. They nearly all do it, the old ‘uns. What’s yours is your own business; you don’t let any bugger see how much money you’ve got, even if it’s next to nowt! Mebbe especially if it’s next to nowt!’

  Still having plenty of time to kill, Seymour tried a couple of town-centre betting shops to see if anyone remembered an old boy having a winning bet on Polly Styrene the previous Friday and was not surprised to be greeted with indifference verging on impertinence. He did however establish that in the form book Polly Styrene was a horse that revelled in heavy going, as were Red Vanessa and Usherette.

  At twelve o’clock he returned to the restaurant. To his delight, Parrinder’s waitress turned out to be an extremely attractive Irish girl called Bernadette McCrystal with shoulder-length hair almost as red as his own, who seemed to show a pleasing readiness to be impressed by his official standing. He modestly corrected her when she addressed him as Superintendent and again when she got down to Inspector, but when she then replied, ‘Oh, I’m really sorry, I’m just a plain ignorant country girl, Sergeant,’ he spotted the gleam in her eye and realized he was being sent up.

  Promising himself he would deal with this personal matter in a moment, he showed her the receipt and asked her if she remembered Parrinder.

  ‘I think so,’ she said carefully. ‘Is there maybe something wrong with the old fellow?’

  Suspecting that what she meant was that she was not about to say anything which might get Parrinder into bother, Seymour said gently, ‘I’m sorry to say he had an accident, probably not long after leaving here.’

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry to hear it,’ the girl said, looking genuinely concerned. ‘Was it serious?’

  ‘Very,’ said Seymour. ‘I’m afraid he’s dead.’

  She pulled out a chair from one of the lunch tables and sat down heavily. The restaurant manageress glared disapprovingly from the other side of the room. Seymour glared back and sat down opposite the girl.

  ‘He was such a nice old fellow,’ she said. ‘Full of fun. He said he’d had a bit of luck and was sort of celebrating. That’s what’s so upsetting, there he was all happy with his bit of luck, whatever it was, then he walked out of here and … what was it that happened? Knocked down in the street, was it?’

  ‘He had a fall,’ said Seymour. ‘Did he say what he was celebrating?’

  ‘No. He just ordered the Shopper’s Special, a pork chop was what he had, then he said he’d have some soup to start with, and a portion of mushrooms, see you can see it’s all down here on the bill. Make that a double portion of mushrooms, he said. I’m very partial and as I’ve had a bit of luck, I might as well treat myself as there’s no one else likely to be treating me. And I’ll have a pint of ale with it. We don’t serve pints, I said. Only halves; the manageress doesn’t like to see a pint pot on the table. Bring me two halves then, he said. It’s all
one, they’ll be rejoined together soon enough!’

  ‘What time was this?’ asked Seymour.

  ‘Not long after five,’ she said. ‘He was here about an hour. We weren’t very busy, that awful weather kept people at home, I think, so I had a little bit of a talk with him whenever I went past.’

  ‘But he never said where he’d been or anything?’

  ‘No. He asked me about myself mainly, I got the feeling that the old chap was a bit lonely, well, it’s a lonely time, old age, if you’re on your own, isn’t it?’

  ‘I dare say,’ said Seymour. ‘You didn’t notice how he paid, did you?’

  ‘Why, with money, how else would he pay? He wasn’t the type to be bothered with cheques or credit cards.’

  ‘And did you see his money?’

  ‘I did, and a lot of it there was,’ she said without envy. ‘Part of his stroke of good luck, I supposed. He gave me a pound for myself. Sure and the meal didn’t come to above a fiver, not even with his extra mushrooms. I told him not to be daft, but he said it would have been worth it just for the seeing of me across the room, let alone the service, so I took it and said thank you and hoped he’d come back soon with his blarney and all.’

  Her eyes filled with tears. Seymour said hastily, ‘When you say a lot, what do you mean?’

  ‘I don’t know. It looked a lot, that was all.’

  ‘Did he have it in a wallet, or what?’

  ‘No, it was in an old envelope, one of those long buff things. There was an elastic band round it, I recall.’

  ‘An envelope? You’re sure it wasn’t just a few fivers in a pension book?’

  ‘No! I’m not blind, am I? It was a lot of money and it was in an envelope. Why d’you ask? Oh, the old chap was never robbed, was he? No, that’d be a terrible thing, terrible!’

  ‘No,’ said Seymour. ‘No, well, we don’t know. I’ll keep you posted if you’re interested.’

  ‘I’d like that,’ said Bernadette.

  ‘Good. What time do you come off duty?’