Under World

by Reginald Hill

  A bell rang shrilly, startling her. It had to ring again before she recognized it was the front door.

  There were two women. One of them she recognized as the thin chain-smoking woman she’d met last time she was here. Wendy something. The other was a tall, raw-boned woman with a rubbery, expressive face.

  ‘Hello. What are you doing here?’ demanded Wendy. Walker, that was it. Clearly the local CIA had put her in the picture too.

  ‘Mrs Farr asked me to look after things here while she went up to the hospital.’

  ‘Oh, did she?’ said Wendy, pushing past with the determination of one who would not be too surprised to find bodies tied up on the carpet.

  ‘I’m Ellie Pascoe,’ she said to the other woman.

  ‘I’m Marion Snape,’ said the other curiously.

  ‘She’s the one I were telling you about,’ said Wendy. ‘Turns out to be a copper’s wife.’

  ‘Look,’ said Ellie. ‘I’ve been through all this with Mrs Farr.’

  ‘Oh aye,’ said Wendy, tossing her cigarette into the fireplace and lighting another. ‘And what did May have to say?’

  ‘She left me in charge here,’ retorted Ellie. ‘Are you responsible for what your husband does, Mrs Walker?’

  For some reason this hit home and for a second Ellie thought verbal violence was going to escalate into physical, then suddenly the woman grinned and said, ‘All right. If May left you here, then you can’t be altogether bad, can you?’

  ‘You must forgive her, Mrs Pascoe,’ said Marion Snape in a voice tinged with relief. ‘She didn’t get thumped enough when she were a little ’un.’

  ‘That’s me. Deprived in every way. All right, missus, seeing as we’ve got ourselves a line into the enemy camp, mebbe you can fill us in on what’s going off.’

  The question and answer session that followed left Ellie feeling drained, but the ice was broken and melted by the time her interrogators had finished with her. Then it was her turn.

  She went straight to the point.

  ‘All this seems to be about Colin’s dad,’ she said. ‘What did happen there?’

  The two women exchanged glances, then Marion said, ‘If I knew, I’d not tell you, but as I don’t there’s no harm in telling you the different stories.’

  This interesting distinction between confidence and commonalty being approved by Wendy, Marion began. She was not long allowed sole occupancy of the stage as Wendy kept chipping in with addenda and corrections of details of date, time, meteorology, dress, disposition and genealogy, and soon it became an oratorio for two voices.

  What it came down to was that Billy Farr was a man not easy of access, but once reached, his affections were given unreservedly.

  ‘He loved May – and Colin – and that little tyke of his – Jacko – and little Tracey – he idolized that child – he couldn’t have hurt her, not in a month of Sundays – he’d have loved a daughter of his own – that’s why he were so fond of that Stella –’

  ‘But he stopped being fond of her, didn’t he?’ interrupted Ellie.

  ‘Aye, well, she chucked his lad over, didn’t she,’ said Marion.

  ‘Surely that was after Mr Farr had died,’ objected Ellie.

  ‘Were it?’ The two women exchanged glances. ‘Well, mebbe it were – but there’s no getting away from it – no matter what anyone says, Billy Farr couldn’t have harmed little Tracey – there’s no getting away from it –’

  Ellie had a vague feeling that they had got away from something.

  ‘You didn’t mention Arthur Downey. When you were talking about Mrs Farr’s friends.’

  ‘Downey?’ said Wendy. ‘He’s nowt but a big kid. Thinks two turnips and a bag of spuds’ll make you love him for ever.’

  ‘He’s all right, Arthur,’ said Marion. ‘Doesn’t say much, but what he does makes sense. And he treats women like they’re human, which is a rare quality round here. I’ve sometimes thought he’d mebbe have married May if the Strike hadn’t happened.’

  ‘That’s one good thing that came out of it, then,’ said Wendy.

  ‘What’s the Strike got to do with it?’ wondered Ellie.

  ‘She means May got us instead,’ explained Wendy. ‘Widow wanted support in the old days, there was nowhere to turn except family to start with and then mebbe another fellow. You only existed round here as a wife and a mother, so what else was there to do? But the Strike changed all that.’

  And now they were into the Strike and the development of the Women’s Support Groups. Ellie listened enthralled. She found herself beset by a feeling almost of envy for the way in which these women had had to struggle with traditions, backgrounds, communities and families to achieve even a modest degree of self-determination.

  And behind the envy lurked something else. She tried to identify it but couldn’t. Then she realized she was avoiding the obvious. What went hand in hand with envy? Could it be that just as deep down these women almost certainly resented her for having had it too easy, she in her turn resented them for having had it too hard?

  She wrenched them back to the Farrs.

  ‘Could Billy have killed himself?’ she asked. ‘Not because he was guilty of killing the child, but because he felt guilty for leaving her alone?’

  ‘Mebbe,’ said Wendy slowly. ‘Christmas is the kiddies’ time. Mebbe it just got to him, is that what you mean? But I’d not have said it was likely. He wasn’t a quitter. Even them who reckoned he could have been guilty didn’t all think he committed suicide. There were some who said …’

  Marion shot her a warning glance.

  ‘Said what?’ prompted Ellie.

  ‘They were the daftest of the lot,’ said Marion. ‘They said that there were those in Burrthorpe who were so sure Billy Farr were guilty that they’d tried and sentenced him themselves and executed him by chucking him down that shaft.’

  Silence fell in the room, a silence compounded of horror and excitement. It was the excitement that made Ellie feel more alien than anything else. The horror was the general human reaction to such monstrosities. The excitement was the buzz of speculation and anticipation which must have run around frontier towns when the word spread that a lynching was in the offing. Rough justice, sorting out your own messes, taking care of your own – all the old vigilante clichés ran through her mind. Burrthorpe was a frontier town, not in the geographic, political sense, but in terms of its monogenesis, its cultural separateness, its awareness of constant threat. Its inhabitants had put down roots in a unique sense. Deep beneath the streets and houses lay the reason for their existence, the hope of their continuance. When finally the coal was exhausted or adjudged too expensive to be worth the hewing, Burrthorpe would literally be cut off from its roots and die.

  She didn’t belong here. She was an Easterner, visiting the ‘Romantic’ West to collect experiences for her dinner-parties back home, and the dusty, violent, uncompromising reality was proving too much for her delicate stomach.

  ‘You OK, love?’ said Marion anxiously.

  ‘Yes. Sorry.’

  ‘Poor lass is probably starving,’ said Wendy. ‘Have you seen the time?’

  ‘Bloody hell! It’ll be shut.’

  ‘Not if we hurry. We usually go down the Club on Wednesdays and have a pie or something,’ explained Wendy. ‘We’ll need to get our skates on. You’ll come, won’t you?’

  Suddenly they were just women again, reachable, vulnerable, lovable, not inhabitants of another and frightening world.

  ‘Yes, please,’ she said.

  She felt quite euphoric as they hurried out of the back door and along the narrow alleyway running between the fences of the rear gardens of the parallel rows of houses. They came to a cross alley where Marion guided Ellie left towards the road. Wendy however went straight on.

  Ellie paused and said disappointedly, ‘Isn’t Wendy coming with us, then?’

  ‘Aye,’ said Marion. ‘She’ll not be a second.’

  Ellie could see the skinny young wom
an over the corner of the gardens. Then she stopped momentarily out of sight, reappeared clutching something in her hand and hurled whatever it was in the direction of the nearest house.

  There was a loud splintering of glass, then Wendy came running back towards them.

  ‘What’s she doing?’ demanded Ellie, amazed.

  ‘Scab,’ said Marion. ‘Me, I can’t be bothered any more. But Wendy, every time she comes this way, she puts a brick through his window or something.’

  Wendy rejoined them breathless.

  ‘Right through the lavvy window,’ she boasted. ‘I hope the bugger were sitting on it. He always spent a lifetime in there studying the horses.’

  ‘You know him, then? Well, I mean,’ said Ellie.

  ‘I should do,’ said Wendy. ‘He used to be my sodding husband.’

  Suddenly Ellie felt an alien once more and found herself longing for the comfort of a familiar face.

  When they reached the Club, far from meeting the lunch-time exodus as Marion had feared, they found the club room bursting at the seams with bodies, smoke and conversation.

  ‘What’s going off?’ Marion asked the steward after they fought their way to the bar. ‘You got an extension, Pedro?’

  ‘Sort of,’ said Pedley.

  ‘What do you mean, sort of? Either you have or you haven’t.’

  ‘Let’s put it this way,’ said Pedley. ‘I stay open as long as he stays open.’

  He nodded directionally. The women turned and looked. And Ellie found that her wish had been granted, in part at least. There rising through the swirling tobacco mists was a most familiar headland, but she could take no homecoming voyager’s comfort from this first glimpse across a table arctic with glasses of the five-acre face of Andy Dalziel.

  Chapter 16

  Dalziel felt he had earned his money already that day and when Ellie Pascoe came into the bar, he reckoned he was into overtime.

  It wasn’t that he disliked her. On the contrary, he found her a bloody sight more appealing than the majority of his colleagues’ spouses, most of whom were too thick to even notice when he was taking the piss! At least you could have a laugh with Ellie, trade insults, talk straight and not give offence, and give offence but not provoke hysterics.

  Nor could he get too upset at the thought that she might be putting it about. It’d hurt the boy, Pascoe, and that would be a pity, but it wouldn’t be – shouldn’t be – the end of the world. One thing his wide experience of life had taught him was that if a woman was inclined to put it about, you couldn’t stop her, not even with an Act of Parliament. Christ, you’d have to work hard with an act of God! Better then to find out sooner rather than later, while you were still young enough to enjoy your retaliation.

  But there were limits. As far as such things are negotiable, a woman had a duty not to put it about in such a way as to embarrass her husband in his workplace. And for a detective-inspector’s wife to be screwing around with a boy miner who was also chief suspect in a murder inquiry over-stepped these limits by a long, long way. He’d hoped he’d given her a big enough hint in the hospital car park to keep her neb out of things but clearly he’d been too subtle. It was always his chief failing.

  He sighed and said, ‘Whose shout is it? A man could die of thirst in a place like this.’

  He’d been drinking pints with whisky chasers since his arrival. Not to be outdone, Tommy Dickinson had followed suit. Ten or more pints was a normal evening’s consumption for Tommy but the spirit had changed the name of the game. Several times Neil Wardle had tried to urge him to stop or at least to stick to beer. On each occasion Dalziel had added his voice to Wardle’s with the inevitable result that the stout youth had indignantly rejected the advice.

  There’d been others at the table too, a steady flow and ebb as curiosity or a desire to bait this constabulary bear overcame the miners’ distrust and dislike. He’d fended off attacks with equanimity, traded insults with good-natured vigour, even proffered advice to those still at loggerheads with the law. And, as Neil Wardle, still on only his second pint after all this time, noted with grudging admiration, there was scarcely a one of them who got away without answering some pertinent questions. He did his best to pre-empt the grosser indiscretions by interruption or change of subject and each time felt Dalziel’s undulled gaze touch upon him with amused acknowledgement before the talk was rediverted into its previous channel by a nudge which should have been blatant but was merely irresistible.

  ‘You’re a clever sod, I’ll give you that,’ said Wardle in a quiet interlude shortly after Ellie’s arrival.

  ‘There’s some as thinks so,’ said Dalziel complacently. ‘But I’m glad to have your endorsement.’

  ‘I didn’t mean it as a compliment.’

  ‘I didn’t take it as one, so no harm done.’

  ‘When are you going to let Colin out? You’ve got nothing on him, have you?’

  ‘No,’ said Dickinson, suddenly reviving from a cat-nap. ‘There’s nowt on Col, not even them foreskin scientists can pin owt on Col.’

  ‘I hope he means forensic,’ grinned Dalziel.

  ‘Listen,’ said Wardle, very intense. ‘You can get Tommy drunk, but don’t you patronize him, all right?’

  ‘I’d not even dream of it,’ said Dalziel. ‘I’ve grown very fond of Tommy. He’s a lovely lad.’

  ‘Now listen,’ began Wardle angrily.

  ‘Nay, Neil, shut tha gob, it’s not a Union meeting,’ said Tommy Dickinson. ‘And I’m not a little lad needing looked after. Andy here’s all right. If we’d had more like Andy policing the pickets, we’d not have had half the bother we did, isn’t that right, Andy?’

  Dalziel looked at Wardle and smiled evilly.

  ‘Oh aye, Tommy. I think you can safely say that. Not half the bother.’

  A worried-looking man of about sixty approached the table and said, ‘Excuse me, Superintendent, but I’m Chairman of the Club Management Committee and it’s long past our closing time. Our steward reckons you said something about it being OK, but I’m not sure the licence magistrates will see it that way if they get wind of it. So unless we can have something in writing …’

  Dalziel looked at his watch.

  ‘By God, is that the time? You should have been shut half an hour back! Hasn’t time been called? That’s bad, that. You’ll really have to tighten up, mister, else you could lose your licence, you know that?’

  His worry replaced by anger, the Chairman returned to the bar and a moment later the bell rang and Pedley’s voice bellowed, ‘Come on now. Get them drinks off. The holiday’s over!’

  Wardle said, ‘So you run scared too? It’s good to see you don’t really make up all the laws as you go along.’

  ‘What? Nay, lad, you don’t understand. It’s nowt to do with what that old geezer said. It’s just that I’m finished with you lot for the time being, but I’ve still not had a chat with Mr Pedley there, and I can’t do that while he’s busy serving drinks, can I?’

  As the bar slowly cleared Dalziel wandered across to the table where Ellie was still sitting with her companions.

  ‘Hello, ladies,’ he said genially. ‘Hope you had time to enjoy your pies.’

  Wendy looked up at him and gave him a smile of stunning sweetness.

  She said, ‘Piss off, pig.’

  Dalziel said, ‘Who’s your porkist friend, Ellie? Never mind. Can I have a word?’

  Of course the bold reply was ‘anything you’ve got to say to me you can say in front of my friends’ but the only trouble was that Dalziel undoubtedly would, and Ellie wasn’t certain that he wouldn’t be saying things she’d prefer her new friends, or indeed any friends, not to hear.

  So, apology and defiance most becomingly mingling in her face, she rose and moved apart with the fat man.

  ‘I’m glad to see you, lass,’ said Dalziel in a low voice. ‘Have you heard owt useful?’

  Expecting at the least a lecture if not a threat of physical violence, Ellie was taken by
surprise by this approach.

  ‘Useful? What do you mean?’

  ‘Anything that’d help us get to the bottom of this business. South are determined it’s down to Farr, but me, I don’t like jumping to conclusions. Mind you, I can see why they think like that. No one I’ve spoken to has been able …’

  ‘Who’ve you been speaking to?’ demanded Ellie.

  ‘Well, I went round to the Mycrofts’ house …’

  ‘You don’t want to listen to anything that stupid girl has to say! Why would Colin say anything to her he didn’t say to me?’

  Dalziel, who had not laid eyes on Stella Mycroft yet, though he’d heard a lot about her in his rambling chat with Tommy Dickinson, nodded sagely as though understanding Ellie’s odd remark.

  ‘Just what I thought,’ he said. ‘Listen, how’d it be if I got you in to see young Colin?’

  ‘Could you?’ asked Ellie, her face lighting up with a hope which stirred something which might have been the dusty relicts of shame in Dalziel’s gut. Or perhaps it was just the beer.

  ‘Why not? If he’s innocent, the sooner them dozy buggers in South get on the right track the better.’

  Behind her he could see Pedro Pedley urging the reluctant women to leave.

  ‘Best get back to your friends,’ he said, putting his arm round her shoulders and urging her back towards her table. ‘Mr Pedley, I’d like a word. Cheerio, Ellie love. I’ll see you later.’

  Transferring his arm and his attention to Pedley, Dalziel moved away. Ellie watched him go. He never lost the capacity to surprise. Ready for bullying interference and a homily on marital loyalty, instead she’d got sympathy and a promise, well, almost a promise, of access to Colin. She found herself smiling at the prospect.