'What flak?'
‘I don't know. But that's how I know it's coming. He's loyal to his troops. When the heavy shit starts flying he gets us out of the way. You've started something, you and that fat bastard, and I just wanted to be sure you knew what you'd done.'
'Now hang about!' said Pascoe, genuinely provoked now. But Stubbs wasn't in the mood for hanging about. The door shut behind him with a bang.
‘Shit,' said Pascoe. He tried to argue with himself that whatever hole Hiller found himself in, he would have reached anyway, unless he hadn't managed to dig up what Dalziel had managed to dig up, in which case it was just as well the Fat Man had gone sneaking about. But still he felt guilty.
Finally he reached for the phone and dialled.
‘Hello? I would like to speak to Lord Partridge, please. Tell him it's Detective Chief Inspector Pascoe.'
There was a long pause. He pictured his lordship debating whether noble disdain or noblesse oblige was the more profitable reaction.
'Partridge here. How nice to hear from you, Mr Pascoe. How can I help you?'
'You've heard about Miss Marsh?'
'Yes indeed. Dreadfully sad. Still, time and tide wait for no one, not even Scottish nannies.'
'But they do have considerable control over other natural forces. Conception, for instance. The pathologist's report states conclusively that she never had a child. Not even an abortion. Was never pregnant.'
Now the pause felt as if it might last forever.
'Now what makes you think I might be interested in that rather esoteric piece of information, Mr Pascoe?' said Partridge at last in a level voice.
'I recall you talking about your interest in law and order,' said Pascoe. 'I presume that Miss Marsh, in pursuit of both verisimilitude and profit, presented you with some form of medical bill. An abortion clinic, was it? Or did she go the whole hog and claim to have had the child? That would up the ante considerably. Now you, my lord, are not a simple man, ready to dole out cash on the evidence of a few figures on the back of a fag packet. You would need to see a properly receipted account, and in order to get that, Miss Marsh would have needed an accomplice, possibly a nurse or a clerical worker in the relevant medical establishment. Surely as a big law and order man, you want to see this person brought to justice?'
He could hear himself speaking in the measured reasonable voice Dalziel accused him of always using as his flights of fancy spiralled into the inane. He finished and waited for Partridge to shoot him back to earth with anger, amazement, threats of phoning the Chief Constable, petitioning Parliament, bringing back the cat. What the hell! It was worth it just to know that the old bugger knew that he knew. Also the realization that he'd been doling out cash all these years on the basis of a phantom pregnancy would probably haunt him forever!
He heard a sound at the other end of the line. The splutterings of inarticulate rage perhaps? It increased in volume. Now there was no mistaking it. Not rage, but laughter. And not the forced laughter of a man trying to put a good face on things, but the wholehearted laughter that came from relief and genuine amusement.
'Mr Pascoe, I thank you. It was a great kindness, in the midst of your busy life, to find time to ring me. Many thanks. If you're ever up this way again, do call in. We'll always be glad to see you. Goodbye now.'
The phone went dead.
'Well, bugger me,' said Pascoe.
There was a discreet cough from the doorway. It was Wield with a cardboard folder in his hands and a faint smile on his craggy features.
'Trouble?' he said.
'No. But that's the trouble,' said Pascoe. Such antilogy required explication.
Wield listened, sighed, and said, 'You can't leave it alone, can you?'
'If Partridge had got mad, maybe I could.'
'But he sounded relieved? Well, he's got a problem off his hands, hasn't he? With Marsh's death, I mean.'
He knew that before I rang him. Maybe he knew it before anyone rang him.'
Wield whistled and said, 'Hold on. You start saying things like that without evidence and you really are in trouble.'
'The description of Marsh's visitor fits,' said Pascoe stubbornly.
'Only like Hiller's jacket,' mocked Wield. 'Tallish? Greyish hair? British warm? Quick glimpse from behind? It'd make a great line-up! In any case, if he killed her, the news that she'd conned him all these years, so he didn't need to kill her anyway, would hardly send him over the moon, would it?'
'You'd think not.' Pascoe laughed. 'Odd thing is, I quite like the old sod. I picked on him because he was the only target I had. As old Tory lords go, he's not so bad. I've been reading his autobiography. I reckon on the whole he does more good than harm, which is more than you can say about most ex-politicians.'
'Knows how to blow his own trumpet, does he?' said Wield sceptically.
'Naturally. But, oddly enough, it's at its most muted when he mentions his charity work; you know, like he wants to publicize the charity, not himself. This Carlake Trust that's getting the royalties from the book, well, it seems he hands his House of Lords Attendance allowance straight over to them too. But he doesn't make a big deal of it, just mentions it in passing.'
'Funny kind of thing for him to get involved with,' mused Wield.
'Why so?'
'Nowt really, except that people like Partridge must get a lot of requests to sponsor charities and they usually pick on summat they've a personal link with, like cancer appeals if your missus dies of it, or heart if you've had an attack.'
'So why should Partridge be so interested in an organization that runs homes for kids so badly handicapped their parents couldn't face bringing them up . . . ?'
The two policemen were looking at each other in wild surmise.
'When did he first get interested?' demanded Wield.
'Hang on,' said Pascoe, turning pages. 'If I remember right, Partridge was in almost from the start. It's his support that has built the Trust up into a national charity . . . here it is. "When I first met Percival Carlake, he was running a single home, created from his family house near Dunfermline in Fife . . ." And that was, let me see, 1971. It fits! And they've now got over twenty homes all over the country, mainly due to Partridge's support.'
'Conscience money?'
'More than money, Wieldy. Bloody hard work. Oh, that cunning woman! She fixes things with a mate in, say, Edinburgh, I bet it was Edinburgh, that's where she came from. All she plans to start with is to get a bit of pocket money, and a birth costs more than an abortion. Perhaps she's going to say it was a stillbirth, but her mate tells her about some other woman at the same clinic or hospital or whatever who's just had a dreadfully handicapped child. She cannot or won't look after it, and the kid's going to the Carlake Home. Marsh sees a chance for a really long-term stranglehold on Partridge. Saying she'd had a healthy kid and put it out to adoption was too risky. Partridge might have got too interested. Checking up would have been easy. But a child like this
'There'd still be records.'
'Sure. Mother's name. Say she's called Smith. Marsh tells Partridge she used the name Smith to hide her shame. Gets all the forged receipts made out in the name Smith. And once Partridge accepts it, she's got him for life.'
'So he starts taking an interest in Carlake's work to ease his conscience?' Wield frowned. 'You'd think a man who was that bothered would have said, "Stuff it," and simply admitted to the kid. He was out of politics by then, wasn't he?'
'He still had Lady Jessica to worry about,' said Pascoe.
'You think she knew?'
'The way she talked about Marsh, she knew something. Anyway, Wieldy, this is all speculation. I'll pass it on to Hiller, but it's a dead end for me, as you'll no doubt be relieved to hear.'
'Not quite a dead end,' said Wield.
Pascoe looked at the Sergeant keenly. There was no gleaning anything from that fallow face, but his ear was finely attuned to the modes of his voice.
'In what particular respect?' he inquired.<
br />
‘If you're right about Miss Marsh, it shows there's nowt much she'd not have done to earn a bit of extra bread,' said Wield.
'What have you been up to, Wieldy? Don't tell me that you've forgotten to practise all that stuff you were preaching?'
'Not exactly. I just thought it might be interesting to get a look at the alumni (is that the word?) of Beddington College in nineteen seventy-six. This is it. See anything you fancy? I've underlined the name that caught my eye.'
He put the open folder before Pascoe with the flourish of a head waiter presenting a menu.
Pascoe's eyes drifted slowly down the names till he arrived at the one with the red line beneath it.
'Well, well, well,' he said. 'Now this does look like a tasty little dish, though I'm not sure how much it will be to Andy Dalziel's taste. How are we fixed with America? Is it still yesterday over there, I wonder?'
'God knows,' said Wield, it could even be tomorrow.'
PART THE FOURTH
Golden Grove
ONE
'I have sometimes sat alone . . . listening, until I have made the echoes out to be the echoes of all the footsteps that are coming by and by into our lives.'
The morning sun through the window first warmed, then woke the gaunt-faced man. He lay without moving, for until he moved, he could almost forget what he was and recall something of what he had been. His thoughts drifted like dust motes in the sunbeams, inconsequential, uncontrolled, touched by golden light for a moment, then gone.
The door opened. Marilou Bellmain said, 'You're awake.'
'Like Lazarus,' he said, trying a smile.
'I heard Lazarus was reluctant.'
'He can't have had a wife like you.'
'I bet he didn't have your gift of the gab. You ready for breakfast?'
'I think I shall get up for it.'
'You think that's wise?' she said. 'Shouldn't you rest up a few days till you get your strength back?'
'All otherwise to me my thoughts portend,' he said. 'I want to get up while I still can. And besides, like Milton's Samson, I feel I may be getting a few visitors during the course of the day.'
'Like who?' she said suspiciously.
'Like friends and neighbours dropping by to see how I am.'
He pulled back the sheet and she came forward to help him, saying, 'I don't want people tiring you out.'
'Hush, dear,' he said. 'At the first sign of fatigue, you may rush forward dragon-like to burn them off.'
He looked at himself in the dressing-table mirror and said sadly, 'I'm like Samson at least in this. I've lost my hair.'
‘It'll grow again.'
'Now they've stopped the treatment? Yes, there may be time to complete my Americanization with a crew-cut. I'm sorry, I don't mean to upset you with my morbidity.'
'I don't mean to let it show.'
He put his thin arms around her comfortable waist. Once a slim, elegant woman, she had thickened out as he had wasted away, as if by eating for two, she could keep them both alive.
He said, 'Marilou, you're the best thing that ever happened to me. You more than make up for all the rest.'
She looked at him seriously and said, 'All? You can't mean that.'
'I can't change it, so I've got to add it up and balance it out. And I must admit my life looked like bankrupt stock till that day we bumped into each other in Mexico City. After that, you can't argue with the figures.'
She stooped to him then and pressed her lips to his, no peck for an invalid but a full-blooded kiss.
She said, 'You want to get dressed as well as get up?'
'Certainly I do. Only whores and the Bourbons receive visitorsdeshabilles.'
'These visitors again,' she said. 'You are expecting someone, aren't you?'
'Not exactly,' he said slowly. 'But I've felt for some time now that someone, somewhere, perhaps more than one, was on their way to see me. And they won't have to hang around too long, will they? Sorry again. But Marilou, my darling, promise me this. Whoever comes asking for me today, let them in. Turn no one away. No one.'
‘If that's what you want,' she said. 'But just today. After today, I call the shots, OK?'
'Agreed,' said James Westropp. 'Now go and start breakfast.'
'Sure you don't want a hand?'
'An English gent may on occasion allow a lady to take his clothes off, but putting them on he reserves to himself.'
'Is that so? Well, this is America and we do things our own way here.'
'Wrong,' he said. 'This is the capital city of the Colony of Virginia, preserved as it was when my great-great-great- great-grand something was your undoubted sovereign, so when I speak, you'd better jump.'
'I'm jumping,' she laughed, and went out.
And now James Westropp rose slowly, steadied himself against the bed, then opened the wardrobe door. Above the hanging rail there was a shelf. He reached his hand deep inside this, groped around for a moment, then withdrew it holding a shoebox.
Temporarily exhausted, he sat down on the bed till he got his breath. Then he opened the box.
It contained a small automatic pistol, an old buff envelope, and an ormolu pillbox with a coat of arms on the lid. He shook it. It rattled. He glanced in his dressing-table mirror and studied his wasted features.
'Coals to Newcastle,' he murmured.
Then he stood up once more and began to dress himself for his visitors.
Less than two miles away Cissy Kohler stood under a shower and raised her face to the stinging jets. After three decades of English trickles, she had forgotten the fierce delight of a real American shower. She would have to take care not to become addicted. Already her skin was developing the pink puffiness which comes from too much exposure to hot water, but it was hard to step out of this burning stream which eased her tense muscles, misted up her scarred mind and almost threatened to wash away the ingrained memory of those prison years.
She twisted the control of Cold, gasped as the temperature dropped by forty degrees, and switched the flow off.
As she towelled herself vigorously, she took note for the first time that she was beginning to put on weight. She had no particular interest in food, merely ate what was put in front of her, but clearly what was being put in front of her now was much more likely to show in front of her than the rigid diet of Her Majesty's Prisons.
What was more interesting than the actual changes to her flesh and her skin was the fact that she had noticed them.
Was she experiencing the return of vanity? Could it really be that as this climactic confrontation approached after so many years, instead of trying to refine all she felt, all she had experienced, into clear unambiguous phrases, she was letting her energies be sidetracked into looking her best?
She turned to the long bathroom mirror. It was misted up and for a moment the pink figure she could see dimly through the vapour was the girl she had been the day before that endless yesterday. She reached forward with the towel and drew aside those misty curtains.
She took a long steady look at the picture revealed, then slipped into her bathrobe and went out into the bedroom.
Jay Waggs was standing in the doorway.
'Hi, I knocked but guessed you couldn't hear me for the shower. Hey, you look almost happy. Is that a smile I see?'
‘I was thinking: Why look your best when your worst will get you by?'
'Yeah? I'll need time to work on that one. Meanwhile I've news for you. That cop, the one I hit. He's staying here, the same hotel. I saw him coming in to breakfast, then he got paged to the phone.'
Cissy Kohler shrugged.
'So he's here. He's got no authority.'
'We don't know that. We don't know who he's working for. He bothers me.'
Cissy said, 'He's the kind of man, if I'd hit him I guess he'd bother me too.'
Waggs said, 'If that wasn't so true, it'd be almost a joke. Ciss, you're very lively this morning. I knew this reunion scene was something you wanted, but I don't anticipate it bein
g something to make you happy.'
'What's happy?' said Kohler. 'Don't be deceived. Jay. I'm ready, that's all.'
'Good girl. First, though, I think maybe I should talk to the fat guy, find out where he's coming from. I don't want him spoiling things.'
'You're very brave, Jay,' she said.
Recalled to Life Page 28