Dalziel 11 Bones and Silence

by Reginald Hill

  Signed: Gregory Waterson.

  After his second reading, Wield stood in silence for a while.

  'What's the matter?' said Waterson. 'Not the right format? Get it typed up any which way you like, Sergeant, and I'll sign it.'

  Gathering his wits, Wield said, 'No, sir, it's fine. Will you excuse me?'

  He went out. A ward sister had appeared at the desk, a stout woman with a smile of great sweetness which switched on as he approached and identified himself.

  'I met Mrs Waterson a moment ago,' he said. 'Is she not on this ward?'

  'No. Women's surgery. Did you want her?'

  'No. At least not now. I'd like a telephone, if I could.'

  'In my office, just down there.'

  'Thanks. Any idea when Mr Waterson will be discharged?'

  'You'll need to ask Dr Marwood. Shall I get him? He's just down the ward.'

  'Yes, please.'

  He went into the tiny office and dialled. He identified himself to the switchboard operator and asked to be put through to Dalziel. A moment later Pascoe answered the phone.

  'That you, Wieldy? Look, the Super's in with the Chief. Anything I can do to help?'

  Quickly Wield filled him in.

  'Oh dear,' said Pascoe. 'No wonder you sounded relieved to get me.'

  'It's not quite the same story as Swain's,' said Wield, in search of a silver lining.

  'No. But it's a bloody sight closer to it than Fat Andy's version,' said Pascoe.

  'You don't think he could have got it wrong?'

  'Are you going to tell him that?'

  'I'm only a sergeant. Chief Inspectors get the danger money,' said Wield. 'Went all right, did it, your big moment? Corks popping and such?'

  'I got a cup of instant coffee. Is Waterson fit enough to come down here for a bit of close questioning?'

  'He looks in rude health to me but I'm just going to check with the doctor.'

  As Wield replaced the receiver, the door opened and a black man in a white coat came in. He was in his late twenties, with a hairline further back and a waistline further forward than they ought to be.

  'Marwood,' he said. 'You the one wanting to know if Waterson's fit to go? The answer's yes. Sooner the better.'

  This sounded like something more than a medical opinion.

  'Thank you, Doctor,' said Wield. 'Were you on when he was admitted?'

  'No, but I've seen the notes. Shock; sedation. Well, the sedation's worn off. Never lasts long with his type. Same with shock, I'd say.'

  'His type?'

  'Volatile,' said the doctor. 'At least that's one way of putting it.'

  Wield said, 'Do you know Mr Waterson, sir? I mean, not just as a patient?'

  'We've met. His wife works here.'

  'And it was through her . . . ?'

  'Staff parties, that sort of thing. He turned up a couple of times.'

  'And how did he strike you?' asked Wield.

  'Did I take to him, you mean? No way! He struck me as an opinionated little shit, and crypto-racist with it. I wasn't surprised when she left him.'

  'Left him?'

  'You didn't know?' Marwood laughed. 'If I try to operate without knowing my patient's a haemophiliac, I get struck off. But you guys just muddle through and no one gives a damn! What's he done anyway?'

  'Just helping us, sir,' said Wield, wondering how Marwood would have reacted to the scene he had interrupted minutes earlier. 'How long have they been separated?'

  'Not long. She moved into a room in our nurses' annexe. Excuse me.'

  A bleeper had started up in his pocket. He switched it off and picked up the phone.

  'Right,' he said after a moment. Replacing the receiver, he said, 'I've got to go. Listen, medically, Waterson's fit to go. But personally and off the record, I'd say the guy should be put out to pasture at the funny farm.'

  He left. Wield pondered what he had heard for a while. Clearly Marwood felt about Waterson as Dalziel felt about Swain. Such strong antipathies bred bias and clouded the judgement. Wield knew all about bias, hoped he would speak out against it if necessary. But for the moment all that he was required to do was deliver Waterson safe into Dalziel's eager hands.

  He went back to the small side ward.

  It was empty.

  Suddenly his heart felt in need of intensive care. He went out to the nurse's station. The plump sister gave him her smile.

  'Where's Mr Waterson, sister?' he asked.

  'Is he not in his bed?'

  'No. ‘He might be in the lavvy. Or perhaps he's gone to have a shower.'

  'You didn't see him? Have you been here all the time, since we talked, I mean?'

  He must have sounded accusatory.

  'Of course I haven't. I went off to fetch Dr Marwood to see you, didn't I?' she retorted.

  'Where's the lavatory? And the shower?'

  The lavatory was the nearer. It was empty. But in the shower Wield found a pair of pyjamas draped over a cubicle.

  Either Waterson was wandering around naked, or . . .

  He returned to the sister.

  'What would happen to his clothes when he was admitted?'

  'They'd be folded and put in his bedside locker,' she said.

  The locker was empty.

  'Shit,' said Wield. Only a few months earlier during the case on which Pascoe had hurt his leg, a suspect had made his escape from a hospital bed and Dalziel had rated the officer responsible a couple of points lower than PC Hector. But no reasonable person could have anticipated that a mere witness who'd volunteered a statement would do a bunk!

  Then Dalziel's features flashed upon Wield's inward eye and reason slept.

  'Oh shit,' he said again. Something made him glance down at his lapel. The tiny snowdrop had already wilted and died. He took it out and crushed it in his hand. Then with wandering steps and slow he made his way back to the telephone.

  CHAPTER THREE

  The Reverend Eustace Horncastle was a precise man. It was through exactitude rather than excellence that he had risen to the minor eminence of minor canon, so when he said to his wife, 'The woman is pagan,' she knew the word was not lightly chosen.

  Nevertheless she dared a show of opposition.

  'Surely she is merely exuberant, dramatic, full of life,' she said with the wistful envy of one who knew that whatever she herself had once been full of had seeped away years since.

  'Pagan,' repeated the Canon with an emphasis which in a lesser man might almost have been relish.

  Looking at the object of their discussion who was striding vigorously across the Market Square ahead of them, Dorothy Horncastle could not muster a second wave of disagreement. Eileen Chung's silver lurex snood was a nod in the direction of religiosity, and there was perhaps something cope-like in the purple striped poncho draped round her shoulders. But devil-detection begins at the feet, and those zodiac-printed moccasins with leather thongs biting into golden calves each separately sufficient to seduce a Chosen People, were a dead giveaway. Here was essence of pagan. If you could have bottled it, the Canon's wife might have bought some.

  The clerical couple were almost at a canter to keep up with those endless legs, so when Chung stopped suddenly there was a small collision.

  'Whoa, Canon,' said Chung amiably.

  'A canon indeed, but little woe,' said Horncastle to his wife's amazement. He rarely aimed at wit and when he did was more likely to try a Ciceronian trope than plunge into a Shakespearean pun. A suspicion formed in Dorothy's mind, to be brushed away like a naughty thought at Communion, that her husband might have invited her presence this morning not simply to represent the views of the laity (his phrase), but because he felt the need of a chaperone!

  There had been one full meeting of the Mysteries committee which had been as long as an uncut Hamlet and not nearly as jolly. The combined verbosity of a city councillor, a union leader, a member of the Chamber of Commerce, a mediaeval historian, a journalist and Canon Horncastle, had defeated even Chung's directorial
expertise and she had resolved thereafter to pick them off singly as she had picked them on singly in the first place. The diocese contained many worldlier, merrier clerics who would have given half their tithes to be religious advisers on such a project, but Chung's homework had told her Horncastle was the man. Heir apparent to the senescent Dean, he was the key figure in the Cathedral Chapter on matters relating to sacred sites and buildings, and the Bishop was said to respect his views highly, which her interpreter assured her was Anglican for being shit-scared of him.

  'I thought this might be a good site for one of the pageants,' said Chung. 'The sun will be coming round behind the Corn Market at that time of day and it'll light up the wagon like a spot.'

  'If the weather is clement,' said the Canon.

  'I'll rely on your good offices for that,' laughed Chung.

  Dorothy Horncastle waited for her husband's expected rebuke at this meteorological blasphemy but it didn't come. Instead something horribly like a simper touched his narrow lips. The unbelievable notion rose again that perhaps he really did need protection! Not sexually, for the frost in those loins was surely proof against the most torrid touch, but there were other temptations in this pagan's armoury. She'd been mildly puzzled when at breakfast this morning Eustace had started reminiscing about his seminary triumph in the chorus line of Samson Agonistes. If Lucifer could fall, why not a minor canon?

  It was time for a dutiful wife to come to the rescue.

  She said, 'Won't the market stallholders object to their customers being turned into an audience?'

  Horncastle turned his cold gaze upon her, no simper now deflecting the straight line of those lips.

  'Monday is not a market day in normal circumstances, I think you'll find. When it happens also to be a Bank Holiday, it seems more than ever unlikely that there should be any commercial activity, wouldn't you say, my dear?'

  The heavy sarcasm, though hardly novel, still had power to bruise. Chung, sensitive to drama, stepped in swiftly.

  'Hasn't he told you that we finalized our timetable at the meeting, Mrs Horncastle? That's a man for you, thinks we're all psychic! Well, we're going for the first week in June, which has the feast of Corpus Christi in it, that's the traditional time when these Mysteries were performed, and also this year it happens to be the week of the Spring Bank Holiday which means we can use the holiday Monday for our grand opening procession without getting snarled up with all the usual commercial traffic. So, this way everyone's happy, Church, holiday-makers, shop-keepers, historians and traffic cops!'

  'It must be gratifying to make so many people happy,' said Dorothy Horncastle, smiling wanly.

  She's really rather pretty, thought Chung. Ten minutes with the Leichner box, an auburn wig to match those eyes, plus a rich red gown with a fret of mourning black lace at the throat, and she'd make a perfectly presentable Olivia. Instead, unmade-up, her fine features skeletally honed by the biting wind, her hair invisible under a shapeless wool hat and her body unguessable under a shapeless tweed coat, she looked like a Village Thespians' shot at Mother Courage.

  They moved on, entering the narrow skein of mediaeval streets which curled around the cathedral. Chung modified her pace so that she came between the Horncastles and modified her tone also, talking earnestly of her desire to recapture those days when the spiritual and temporal were inextricably intertwined and the Church was the one true centre of civic life. At the same time her eyes were taking in every detail of the winding cobbled ways flanked by close-crowded shops and houses whose timbered gables often threatened to meet overhead. And through her mind's eye, heavily screened so that not the slightest verbal hint should slip out to give the Canon pause, ran pictures brimming with colour and excitement of the great pageant wagons rumbling over the cobbles, heralded by music and dancers and trailing a long wash of jugglers, tumblers, fire-eaters, fools, flagellants, giants, dwarves, dancing bears, merry monks, cut-price pardoners, knights on horseback, Saracens in chains, nubile Nubians ... At about this point in his solo session, her university mediaevalist had demurred but she had silenced him with a cry of, 'Shit, man! This show's for your person-in-the-street. Ask yourself, do they want it authentic, or do they want it fun?' And then had won his cooperation by squeezing him well above the knee and laughing, 'OK. So maybe we'll hold the Nubians. That make you happy?' And, as she squeezed again, he could not but agree that it did.

  And now they came into the cathedral close and everything changed. Little of the mediaeval had survived the 'modernization' of the eighteenth century when Wyatt the Destroyer's internal restorations had been mirrored and magnified in a ruthless external clean-up of what even antiquarians had had to admit was an ecclesiastical slum. A fourteenth-century deanery had been spared because the eighteenth-century dean had simply refused to move his large family, and a row of Jacobean almshouses had presented a similar logistical problem. Between these and a scattering of other survivals had sprung up new buildings in styles ranging from neo-classic domestic, through romantic picturesque to Victorian Gothic; and by one of those coincidences quite beyond the wit of architects and planners, the result was a delightful and harmonious meld. Nothing was here to provoke a Prince.

  The close was entered through a granite gateway in a sandstone wall, and though the old wooden gates had long since vanished, there was still a sense of being admitted, of passing from the hectic and neurotic atmosphere of modern life into a balmier, more restful air.

  Chung made a mental note to get the gateway measured. She wanted her procession to be fun, and she didn't want it to end in farce with a pageant firmly wedged between the pillars. She had hold of the Canon's arm now to steer him along her reconnoitred route while at the same time permitting him to imagine that it was his expertise which was showing her the best way. This was not easy as the best way could hardly be said to involve the cathedral close at all, since Charter Park, the proposed site for the daily performance of the Mystery Plays, lay as far to the west of the market place as the cathedral lay to the east. Chung had justified her diversion on ecclesiastical grounds. The grand opening procession must be seen to embrace the sacred as well as the profane.

  Her real reason, however, was that she had no intention of staging her production in the Park, which was broad and flat and bounded by a main road and a canalized river, providing a choice between a static background of gloomy warehouses or a moving one of double-decker buses.

  Her chosen site was much closer at hand. On the far side of the cathedral and belonging to it stretched an expanse of green and pleasant land, dotted with old trees and sinking down in a shallow valley before swelling up once more to a natural vallum where remnants of the city's mediaeval walls could still be seen. More substantial than these stood the ruins of St Bega's Abbey from which had come much of the impetus and, after its closure, some of the material to enlarge the small Anglo-Norman cathedral into a huge Gothic edifice which could hold its own against any in the land.

  This was the setting Chung lusted after.

  They had arrived at the great building itself. She paused and craned her neck to take in the soaring bulk of the lantern tower.

  'It's incredible,' she said. 'How did they do all this without machines?'

  'They had something better. They had God,' said the Canon.

  It was a good feed. She looked at him appraisingly and said, 'And that's all you need? I think I'm getting close to finding mine. Canon, would it be possible to climb the tower to get a bird's eye view of things?'

  Horncastle hesitated but his wife inadvertently came to Chung's aid. Pointing across the road to a tall gabled house as narrow and forbidding as the Canon himself, she said, 'I thought as we were so near home, a cup of coffee perhaps . . .'

  'Dorothy,' said the Canon testily, 'I have pledged myself to advise Miss Chung this morning. In an hour's time I have an important luncheon appointment at the Palace. I hardly feel that taking coffee in my own parlour would be a fruitful way of filling the intervening period. If you w
ould follow me, Miss Chung.'

  He headed into the cathedral. Chung smiled apologetically at his wife and said, 'Another time, huh?' before following.

  It was a wearisome climb up a steep, dark, spiral staircase, but worth every ounce of sweat. The city lay stretched beneath them like an illuminated plan, and there was little to interrupt the eye's flight to the distant green and blue horizons. The only contender in terms of height was the narrow tower which had tumesced out of the old redbrick university in the expansive sixties, and though it flashed back the light of the cold wintry sun most defiantly, its glass and concrete hardly gave promise of another six centuries of such defiance.

  Chung moved from side to side, removing her snood to let the chill wind unravel her long black hair. The Canon stood and watched her delight with proprietorial pleasure. Dorothy Horncastle emerged a few moments later from the narrow oak door and stood unnoticed.

  Chung came to rest by the eastern parapet and looked down towards the dwarfed ruins of the old abbey. Horncastle came and joined her.

  'It's magnificent,' she said sincerely.

  'Yes. I pride myself that we have a setting and outlook dramatic enough to stand comparison with any in the country,' said the Canon complacently.

  'A dramatic setting?' said Chung, eagle-eyed for an entree. 'Yes, I see what you mean. You must be a classicist, Canon. That fold of ground there, the Greeks would have had to turn it into an amphitheatre. And the ruins, what a backcloth! No chance of transferring them to Charter Park for the Mysteries, I suppose?'

  'If it were feasible, you should have them,’ replied the Canon, quite happy to hypothesize the impossible in return for Chung's smile.

  'Pity,' she sighed. 'That tatty park could surely do with something to match the material. But you'll be doing wonders enough if you can get us permission to route the procession through the close. I gather the Bishop is none too keen.'