Dalziel scratched his crotch reflectively, then replied in a fawning Heepish tone, “I’m sorry, Mrs Maciver, I know what you must be feeling, but it’s not my decision. Chief Inspector Pascoe’s in charge here. It’s him who’s calling the shots.”
Not the most diplomatic of phrases in the circumstances, thought Pascoe as he sought for the right words to pour oil on these turbulent waters.
But he was saved from proving his diplomatic skills by a long, wavering cry, which for a second he thought was the owl again.
Then it was joined by a male voice raised in alarm and, looking towards the Volvo, he saw that Helen Dunn had sunk back into the car.
“Help me!” cried Jason. “Please someone, help me! The baby’s coming!”
Kay set off at a run with the other women close behind.
“I’ve seen your bedside manner,” said Pascoe to Dalziel. “So, how’s your obstetrics?”
He didn’t wait for an answer but went to his car and said tersely into his radio, “DCI Pascoe at Moscow House in the Avenue, Greenhill. Get an ambulance down here fast as you can. Woman in labour.”
“By God,” said Dalziel behind him. “This is one up for community policing. Don’t worry if your loved one snuffs it. Your modern caring force comes fully equipped with a replacement.”
“Better than that, Andy,” said Ellie who’d come running back from the Volvo. “Two for the price of one. They say she’s having twins.”
“Size of her, I’m surprised it’s not a football team,” said Dalziel. “What’s happening?”
“Her waters have broken. You’ve got an ambulance coming, I take it?”
The radio crackled and a voice said, “Control to Mr Pascoe. Re that ambulance for Moscow House, could be a delay. There’s been a pile-up in fog on the bypass and they’re a bit stretched.”
“So’s that poor girl,” said Ellie. “Look, if it’s going to take that long, I think we ought to get her into the house.”
Dalziel looked at Pascoe and raised his eyebrows.
Pascoe said, “Wouldn’t it make more sense to drive her direct to hospital?”
“If things happen as quickly as I think they might, she doesn’t want to be bouncing around in the back of a car,” retorted Ellie. “There’s light in there, isn’t there? And I’m sure it’s a damn sight warmer than out here. I’ll get it organized.”
She didn’t wait for an answer but returned to the Volvo.
“Shit,” said Pascoe.
“Best-laid plans, eh?” said Dalziel. “Not to worry. Thank your lucky stars it’s only a suicide, not a real crime scene.”
Again that certainty. But no time now for deep questioning. Pascoe headed for the house to reorganize his defences.
Maycock he relocated at the foot of the stairs.
No civilian goes up there,” he commanded. “And I mean no one. Anyone tries, stop ’em. Anyone persists, arrest ’em. Anyone resists arrest, cuff ’em. Is there any other way up there?”
“There’s a back stair,” said Sergeant Bonnick, coming down from the landing, followed by Inspector Ireland. “What’s going on, sir?”
Pascoe explained.
“You cover that back stair, Sergeant. Same as here. No one goes up it, OK? Paddy, how are they doing up there?”
“You know SOCO. Slow but sure,” said Ireland, for once not reacting to his sobriquet. “When they’ve finished the study, they want to know how much of the rest of the house you want done.”
“Tell them to have a look round upstairs,” said Pascoe. “Doubt if there’ll be much point down here once this mob start milling around, but let’s try to keep their movements as confined as possible.”
He went across the hall and flung open a door that led into a large bay-windowed drawing room full of bulky pieces of furniture shrouded in dust sheets.
“You reckon there’s something dodgy about this suicide, Pete?” said Ireland, curious why Pascoe should have any concern about the ground floor.
“I hope not,” said Pascoe. “But if there is, I don’t want things muddied by having the whole place turned into a maternity hospital. We’ll put Mrs Dunn and the others in here till the ambulance comes, and we’ll try to keep them in here.”
“You’ll be lucky,” said Ireland with the cynicism of a father of five, four of whom had been born at home. “Woman in labour, every female within half a mile becomes Queen of the Universe.”
“We’ll just have to do our best, but if any of them do have to come out, I want to know the reason why and I want a record kept of exactly where they go. And I mean exactly. Got that, Paddy?”
“Yes, sir,” said Ireland placatingly. “I’ve got it.”
He’s wondering why I’m being so neurotic, thought Pascoe.
Maybe I should wonder the same.
Does my sensitive nose really scent something untoward about this business, or am I merely reacting to Fat Andy’s ready acceptance of suicide and mysterious hints of preknowledge?
He heard voices in the hallway and went out. The birthing party had arrived, with Helen supported by her husband and Dalziel, Ellie and Kay Kafka in close attendance, and Cressida and Sue-Lynn bringing up the rear. The last two both looked pretty subdued. Not surprising. Husband and brother lying dead upstairs, sister and sister-in-law giving birth below. It was a situation to subdue a Tartar.
“In here,” said Pascoe.
“Couldn’t we get her to a bedroom?” said Dunn.
“Don’t be daft, we’d need a sodding crane,” said Dalziel.
And a cry of pain from Helen persuaded her husband.
Ellie said, “Is the water supply turned on?”
Pascoe looked at Ireland, who said, “Yes, ma’am.”
“Heaters too?”
“I’ll check.”
“Thank you.”
Pascoe looked at Ellie curiously. Those scenes in old movies where birth was accompanied by the boiling up of untold and unused gallons of water had always amused her greatly.
She said, “What?”
He said, “Nothing.”
There was a shriek from the lounge.
“I’d better get in there,” said Ellie.
As she went in, Dalziel came out.
“No place for a sensitive soul,” he said. “Out in the desert they say Bedouin lasses just drop their kids on the march, hardly break step. Don’t need fifty other women all running around like blue-arsed fleas. No word on that ambulance? Mebbe I should talk to the buggers.”
“I don’t think that would help,” said Pascoe sharply. “It will get here as soon as possible, and it will either be in time or it won’t, and all the shouting in the world won’t make any difference.”
“Don’t take it out on me, Pete.”
“Take what out?”
“Come on! Woman so pregnant she can hardly walk, shocked by news that her brother’s topped himself. Doctor and ambulance already at scene. And you let ’em both go! Not the best career move you ever made, lad.”
Pascoe reached forward and seized the Fat Man’s arm.
“You reckon?” he grated into his superior’s smiling face. “Well, here’s what I suggest we do during the few remaining moments of my beautiful career. Let’s find somewhere quiet where you can bring me up to speed on exactly what it is you know about this place and these people that I don’t, OK?”
“Thought you’d never ask,” said Andy Dalziel.
12 • cold, strange world
Dalziel and Pascoe sat side by side at the head of the staircase.
“Can’t credit you know nowt,” said Dalziel. “Where were you ten years back?”
“I don’t know. Where were you a week last Tuesday?”
“Not the same thing,” said Dalziel. “Anyone can lose a day, but I can tell you exactly where I was ten years ago.”
“Bully for you. But hang about … Ten years … March … I remember! I was on my back in bed.”
“Oh aye? Dirty weekend?”
“No. Ellie and I had been away to Ma
rrakesh and I picked up hepatitis.”
“Like I said, dirty weekend.”
“Ha. Anyway, that accounts for me for a month or more. So, where were you that you can be so exact about?”
“Me?” said Dalziel. “Easy. I were here.”
“Here?”
“Aye, lad. Don’t recollect sitting on the stairs, but I was certainly in this house. And for much the same reason. It’s ten years ago to this very day that Pal Maciver Senior, that’s the dad of this lot, him on the wall in the breeks and woolly hat, locked himself in his study, tied a bit of string round the trigger of a Purdy shotgun, looped the other end round his big toe, and blew his head to pieces.”
“Ah,” said Pascoe.
For a moment there didn’t seem anything else to say. Then there seemed to be so much that he took another moment to marshal his words.
“In his study … that’s the same room … and he had an open book on his desk?”
“That’s right. But as I’ve not seen it yet and Bonnick says it were too covered with blood and brain for him to read the title, I can’t say if it’s the same book.”
“But if it were, by which I presume you’d mean the same title not necessarily the same volume, what would that be?”
“Book of poems. Funny little things. Some Yankee bint. Eleanor Dickson, summat like that.”
“Emily Dickinson?”
“That’s the one. Bit weird. Might have guessed you’d know her.”
Ignoring this aspersion on his literary taste, Pascoe was running through what little he knew about the Maciver family history already. He’d met Cressida a couple of times, found her somewhat over intense, and when foolishly he’d wondered aloud how Ellie had come to make a friend out of an aggressive man-basher who, every time she got drunk, attempted to rape her, he’d been lectured on not judging by surfaces. Underneath it all, he was told, Cress was really dreadfully in need of reassurance, and love, probably due to childhood trauma caused by the early death of her parents, which she never talked about.
“I think she was heavily dependent on her brother and they’re still very close, but when he got married, that left a gap in her life. She’s always looking for a strong man to lean on. Trouble is, the bastards always keel over!”
None of this seemed relevant, so he said to Dalziel, “This is a copycat suicide then? That’s what brought you running?”
“Strolling,” said the Fat Man. “Aye, you’re right. Lightning striking twice and all that. Idle curiosity.”
Liar, thought Pascoe, not knowing why he thought it, but knowing he was right.
“But it can’t be exactly copycat, can it?” he said. “This Pal Maciver, the father, I mean, must have been a good bit older—family established, second wife.”
“Mid-forties,” agreed Dalziel. “His lad must be—must have been—barely thirty. At university when it happened, I recall.”
“And Cressida?”
“Boarding school. Final year. She were head girl.”
“That figures. And the younger daughter, Helen?”
“The mobile incubator? She’d have been about nine. She were away in the States with her stepmother. That’s her you saw out there, the classy one.”
Pascoe noted the epithet. In Dalziel’s word-hoard, it usually signified approbation.
“She still lives round here?”
“Aye.”
“Kay Kafka, wasn’t it? That her own name?”
“No. She got married again.”
“To someone called Kafka? That would be one of the Mid-Yorkshire Kafkas?”
“Don’t be racist,” reproved Dalziel. “I once knew a family of Chekhovs, had a farm near Hebden Bridge. Mind you, owt’s possible near Hebden Bridge.”
“This Kafka, was he from Hebden Bridge then?” pressed Pascoe.
“No. A Yank. Her boss,” was the short reply.
There was definitely something here, thought Pascoe. Something not said. He recalled seeing the pair of them meeting beside the ambulance. If she weren’t so slim, he’d have guessed that Dalziel fancied her. But it had long since been established that Mid-Yorkshire CID’s answer to God liked women in his own image, which was to say, with more meat on them than a Barnsley chop.
He said, “So what was the verdict?”
“Suicide while the balance of his mind was disturbed.”
“Disturbed by what?”
“Summat at work they reckoned.”
“And work was …?”
“Ash-Mac’s, machine-tool factory on the Blesshouse Industrial Estate. Used to be Maciver’s. Pal Maciver’s dad, that’s our corpse’s granddad, founded it before the last war.”
“Was he called Palinurus too?”
“Liam. Came across from Ireland to make his fortune and didn’t do so badly.”
“Why’d he stick his son with a name like Palinurus?”
“Story is, back home Liam was a blacksmith, no education, but a lot of business sense. Made money some dodgy folk considered was rightly theirs, which was why he left. Came here, used his money to set up in business …”
“As a blacksmith?”
“Blacksmith makes things out of metal. Machine-tool business is just the posh end of blacksmithery. Any road, soon he were doing well, married a local lass, and decided he really ought to get himself an education. Got talking to some schoolteacher over a drink one night who told him the greatest literary work of the century had come out of Ireland and it were called Ulysses. You heard of it?”
“Of course. Joyce.”
“Aye, her. So Liam went off, determined to read all he could about this Ulysses, only when he asked at the library they got the wrong end of the stick and provided him with lots of stuff about myths and legends and the Trojan War and such, all of which he downed like a gallon of Guinness, and when his missus dropped a sprog, he looked for a name in this lot, and came up with Palinurus.”
“Strange choice.”
“Why’s that?”
“He was Aeneas’s helmsman who dozed off at the helm and fell overboard.”
“Oh aye. Drowned, did he?”
“No, actually. He made it to the shore, the first of the Trojans to reach Italy. Only the natives didn’t like the look of him so they beat him to death and chucked him back in the sea.”
“Well, there you go,” said Dalziel. “Could be Liam thought it ’ud be a useful reminder to his lad every time he heard his name that, if he didn’t keep his eyes open, he could end up in a foreign land being shit upon by strangers.”
Pascoe said, “A little career advice with the paternal sex talk would have been more direct.”
“He was Irish, remember. They don’t do direct. And back then I don’t suppose they did sex talks. But old Liam was right up to date when it came to making money. Lots of demand for machine tools during the war and in the post-war years. Everything seemed to be going his way. You’ll recall the other Mac? Mungo Macallum?”
“The armaments man? Before my time, but I met his daughter, the pacifist.”
“Old Serafina. Aye, I remember that. When Ellie got herself into bother with the funny buggers. Well, Mungo and Liam were sort of rivals for a bit, each looking for skilled men and cheap labour. Scotch Mac and Irish Mac they called them. But when Mungo died in the fifties and Serafina set about turning his business into money to finance her causes, Liam filled his boots. Plant, orders, workers, the lot. By the time his boy—let’s call him Pal Senior and the headless wonder back there Pal Junior, wouldn’t want your brain to overheat—when Pal Senior took over, the business were booming. Pal Senior had an education, nowt special but enough to set him up as an English gent. Did all the things gents are supposed to do, like tearing foxes into shreds and blowing small birds to smithereens.”
“Which is how he had the shotgun to blow himself to pieces?”
“Aye. Could’ve been one of the birds fought back, of course. No, we’d have noticed the bird-shit. Gave all that up in his thirties when he had his accident.”
“Shooting accident?”
“No. As well as huntin’ and shootin,’ he were a bit of a climber in every sense. Yon painting in there shows him at his peak—that’s a joke. You know how those mad buggers like to make life difficult for themselves. Well, he were the first to climb some Scottish cliff, solo, at midnight, on Christmas Day, bollock naked, or summat like that. It were on that mountain in the background. As you can see, him having his picture painted, he were chuffed to buggery. Ironic really.”
“Why so?”
“He went back next year and fell off. Broke this and that. Most of it mended, except his left leg. Couldn’t bend it after that. Not many mountains you can hop up, so it were goodbye to all that. Old Liam was failing, so Pal threw himself into the business, heart and soul. It was his pride and joy, and he was coining so much he were able to put a few down payments on a peerage with the Tories. But all that changed, both the coining and the payments, after seventy-nine when old whatsername started running around like a headless chicken, putting folk out of work. Suddenly it were like Maciver’s was falling off a mountain too. Order book empty, men laid off. Terrible times.”
“Terrible,” agreed Pascoe. “And this is when the takeover happened?”
“Aye. It were looking like rags-to-rags in three generations when this Yank outfit, Ashur-Proffitt Inc, came sniffing round. Pal Senior had a choice between accepting their offer or seeing the rest of his workers laid off. So, no choice. Maciver’s became Ashur-Proffitt-Maciver’s, a.k.a. Ash-Mac’s, and Pal Senior got a fistful of dollars and a seat on the Board, executive director or some such thing. More of a face-saver than a real job, from the sound of it.”
“And that got to him?”
“So they reckoned,” said Dalziel, yawning. “Lots of lolly and nowt to do, sounds like heaven to me, but.”
“So what did you reckon?” asked Pascoe.
“Me? I reckoned he killed himself and that’s all I needed to know. He did it by himself, no one helped him. He weren’t hypnotized or under a spell or owt like that. Simple suicide.”
“Oxymoron,” said Pascoe. “Suicide’s never simple.”
“Oxymoron yourself,” retorted Dalziel. “From our point of view, it’s always simple. Forget the wherefores. The only question is, was it or wasn’t it unassisted suicide? If it was, no crime, so no investigation necessary. End of story.”
D&P21 - Good Morning, Midnight Page 7