D&P21 - Good Morning, Midnight

by Reginald Hill

  Novello looked at the newcomer curiously, then raised an enquiring eyebrow at Pascoe.

  “Mr Laurence Waverley,” he said. “In search of a loo.”

  Cressida, who was sitting at the table looking pale and angry, didn’t even glance up. Lavinia, standing at the window which gave a view of the extensive and heavily wooded rear garden, turned and smiled.

  “There you are, Mr W,” she said. “Would you believe it, the green peckers are still here. Do you recall the first time we met? We heard one hammering away and I was able to take you right to its nest? I wonder if they’re still using that old beech. Of course it may have blown down by now. It was quite rotten ten years ago. Shall we go out and look?”

  Waverley glanced at Pascoe, smiled wryly as if to say, We each deal with death in our own way, and said, “Of course, my dear.”

  He tried the back door. It was locked. He turned to the glass-fronted key cupboard on the wall under the electricity supply box, but before he could touch it, Pascoe said, “I wonder, would you mind going out of the front door?”

  Once let them start opening other entrances to the house, it would become a public thoroughfare. He glanced at Novello. This was a good chance for her to have a chat with Lavinia out of Cressida’s presence.

  She gave a little nod as if he’d spoken the instruction out loud and set off after them. He returned his attention to the key cupboard. On its top there was a scatter of fine debris, plaster, mortar, the kind of stuff you’d expect to accrue in an old neglected house, but thicker here than on any other surface. By contrast the tiled floor beneath looked like it had been well brushed.

  Behind him there was a sound midway between a sigh and a groan from Cressida. He turned, anticipating a renewed verbal assault now they were alone, but instead found her slumped forward with her head in her hands. For a second he thought she was crying but when she raised her face to him, though pale and drawn, her cheeks were dry.

  “Christ, Pete, I could do with a drink,” she said.

  He noted that he’d ceased to be a rank and become a name. Fair enough. She was Ellie’s friend, and if there were anything to be got out of her, he guessed it was more likely to be offered to Pete than to Chief Inspector.

  She rose suddenly and started pulling open cupboard doors. Lots of crockery, but the nearest thing to booze was a row of crystal tumblers. She seemed to lose interest and flopped back down again. Pascoe stared at the tumblers. Glasses left unused for any length of time soon lose their fresh-washed shine and eventually they start collecting dust. These looked like they hadn’t been touched for weeks. Or months. Maybe years. Except for two.

  Carefully he picked one of them up. It left a damp circle on the shelf as if it had been recently washed and put back not quite dry.

  Last night, thought Pascoe. Probably last night someone in the maternity party had wanted a glass of water. Then washed the glass—two glasses—and put them neatly back in place? Not likely, not with them all running around, in Dalziel’s elegant phrase, like blue-arsed fleas.

  “Pete,” said Cressida helplessly, “is there something wrong here or am I just being a pain in the arse for nothing?”

  He replaced the glass and closed the cupboard, taking his time. Resisting the urge to get irritable because grief had provoked someone into being a pain in the arse was easy. Resisting the equally dangerous urge to be open in response to a simple emotional appeal was much more difficult.

  He sat down opposite her and said, “I honestly don’t know, Cress. All I know is that it’s my job to look for something wrong so I can be absolutely sure that nothing is. When I’m sure of that, my job’s done, but it still leaves you with a brother who was depressed enough to take his own life, and you didn’t see it coming. But it’s no use blaming yourself. Not seeing something coming doesn’t make it your fault.”

  “Well, that’s a real comfort,” she said with a flash of her previous aggression. “Whoops. Sorry. There I go again. No, the real trouble is, being a Maciver’s like eating out with a bunch of people so drunk no one can remember what they had so in the end it’s easiest just to divide the bill so you all pay the same. In other words, we’re such a fucked-up family, collective guilt is the order of the day. Not that that stops us pointing the finger at each other, of course.”

  She broke off and fixed him with her huge, almost violet eyes.

  He said, “Anything you can say that might help us understand Pal could be very useful.”

  “Like what?”

  “Well, for instance, this mimicking of your father’s mode of death. What do you imagine that was all about?”

  She looked doubtful for a moment then shrugged.

  “Why not?” she said. “Sitting here in the house I was born in, the house where my mother died and my father and brother topped themselves, maybe I can raise a few ghosts if I tell it like it was.”

  11 • Cressida

  I don’t recollect having an unhappy childhood so I suppose I must have had a happy one.

  What I am sure of is I was happy when I was around Pal and not so happy when Pal wasn’t there.

  The thing was Pal and I were really close, a unit, almost twin-like, I’d say, though there were three years between us. There was nothing sexual in it, let me get that out of the way in case you’re getting horny thinking this is building up to some big incestuous passion scene. OK, we used each other like biological diagrams when we were trying to get to grips with all the where-do-babies-come-from stuff, but when we moved from theory to practice, we both looked elsewhere. Easy in Pal’s case. He was always drop-dead gorgeous. I reckon at least half of my friends wouldn’t have been if I hadn’t been his sister.

  My mother. I was eleven when she died. Periods just started, teens ahead, the age when a girl starts needing her mother most though she imagines she needs her least. Mum was one of those quiet little women you don’t notice is there until she isn’t. Then you start thinking of all the things you could have done or said to let her know you loved her. That’s after you’ve stopped blaming her for dying, of course.

  She’d not been well since she’d had Helen three years earlier. I know girls are expected to go all gooey and maternal when they get a little sister, but maybe there was too big a gap between us. Or maybe it was because Mum had such a bad time, ill through much of the pregnancy and a long hard labour. She was never the same afterwards. She seemed washed out, exhausted, and Helen was a mewling, puking baby who caught everything a baby can catch. Finally though she came through it all. It was like she’d got everything over early and all at once. I don’t think she’s had anything worse than a cold since she was two and a half. I half believe Mum looked at her, thought, that’s you safely out of the woods, relaxed her hold on life, and just slipped away.

  Heart failure, the doctors called it. You can’t get much vaguer than that. After I stopped blaming her for dying, I blamed Helen. And, of course, my father.

  Daddy never seemed to be around much, which could be why I was so close to Pal. I’ve got photos of Mum and Daddy together, of course, but it’s a funny thing, I don’t have any picture of them together in my memory. Not one.

  After Mum died, Aunt Vinnie moved in with us for a while. She wasn’t quite as eccentric then as she is now, but well on the way. An eleven-year-old girl’s capacity for being embarrassed is pretty high and I found Aunt Vinnie acutely embarrassing. I’d have a couple of friends round to the house to play records and suddenly she’d burst in and insist we all went out into the garden to see a lesser twitted willie-warbler, and when we got there it would have gone and we’d hang around for ages waiting for it to come back despite the fact that it was minus two and raining. Girls at school started flapping their arms and whistling whenever they saw me in the playground. I hated it.

  But I was talking about Daddy. He needed someone to look after Helen, I can see that. And Vinnie wasn’t the answer, not in the long term. Also he needed someone to look after the house. And above all, I realize this now,
he needed someone to look after him. Sexually, I mean. He was a big vigorous man and to be honest I don’t think he’d been getting much if anything since Mum gave birth to Helen. I was only a kid but growing up fast, and girls have an instinct for that sort of thing.

  The perfect answer would have been a housekeeper-cum-nanny who fucked, just a matter of advertisement, careful selection, and the promise of a specially big Christmas bonus.

  But Daddy was the great businessman. He saw a way to get all three without having to pay out a penny in advertising or wages.

  He got Kay.

  What were her motives? Not love, I don’t believe love. She was younger than I am now, with a good job and great prospects. What the hell was there about a middle-aged Yorkshire businessman with a gammy leg and three kids to attract her? Remember Jane Eyre and Mr Rochester, you say. Listen, there was nothing romantically mysterious about Daddy, believe me. OK, his father—my granda—was all Irish, but in Daddy the little green genes had long since lost the battle with Yorkshire pudding. Pal was convinced it was some kind of set-up. Ashur-Proffitt were dead keen to get their hands on Maciver’s and when Daddy played hard to get, instead of upping the ante, they told Kay to up her skirts. Why did she have to go the whole hog and marry him? Maybe they wanted someone close in there to keep an eye on him in case he still tried to meddle with the way they were reorganizing the company. Maybe she saw the chance of setting herself up after a couple of years with a nice nest egg as a rich divorcée. Maybe she was prescient and foresaw a future as a merry widow.

  I don’t know. I just know that Pal and I could see from the start that she was doing this purely for herself. The thought of her in my mother’s house, in my mother’s bed, using my mother’s things, made me ill.

  She soon caught on that she hadn’t got Pal and me fooled, so she concentrated on Daddy and Helen. Four years old, what do you know? She’d lost one woman who devoted the whole of her attention to her. Now here comes another apparently willing and eager to do the same. Helen took to her like a fly to jam. As for Daddy, I don’t know what she was doing to him in bed, but he was besotted. Pal and I did what we could by way of resistance, but we both knew we were on a loser.

  It was worse for me, I think. Pal was fifteen, his life was full of things that took him out of the house. You know what boys are like at that age. It was all girls and football. We were still close but maybe not the way we’d been a couple of years earlier. Kay’s arrival threw us back together, which was the only good thing you could say about it. But it also separated us because I decided I couldn’t put up with having to share a house with her all the year round and I spoke to Daddy and told him I’d changed my mind about going away to school.

  He’d been keen for both of us to go to boarding school when we moved into secondary education. Pal had refused point-blank. He said all his mates were going to Weavers and that’s what he wanted too. When it came to my turn, I followed suit. I’d just started there when Kay came on the scene. Suddenly, boarding school didn’t seem such a bad option. I talked it over with Pal and he said he’d miss me but he understood why I wanted to go and there’d be the hols to look forward to. So I went.

  From my point of view it turned out great. I was a bit homesick at first, then I thought of Kay and got over it. I soon made friends and pretty soon I started to enjoy myself. I wrote to Pal, of course, describing all my adventures and he wrote back, telling me what was happening back here. But he never mentioned Kay. It wasn’t till a lot later that I found out what had been going on almost from the moment I left.

  I don’t know if she really fancied him. It wouldn’t have been surprising. Like I say, he was a hunk in the making by the time he was twelve; in his case the gangly spotty stage hardly lasted a year, and suddenly, in his teens, there he was, a dish fit for a queen. And there was always something a bit royal family about Kay. You know, quiet, controlled, never a hair or a word out of place. The royal family like it used to be. And maybe the idea of having father and son turned her on. I felt from the start she was a bit of a sexual athlete. It doesn’t matter how prim and proper the exterior, a woman can usually tell.

  Or maybe it was just that it got up her nose when he and I made it so plain she didn’t take us in and we didn’t like her. She tried the all-girls-together-let’s-be-friends approach on me but gave up when she saw it was getting her nowhere. With a boy it’s different. You men, all of you in your teens, and some for a long time after, once a woman gets hold of your dick, no matter what your personal circumstances or feelings, you’re lost. I know. I’ve tried it and it works. God didn’t give us much in the battle of the sexes but He gave us that.

  So she went after him.

  She’d bump into him accidentally on purpose. Or he’d be passing the bathroom and she’d come out with a towel over her shoulders, everything on show, and wink at him as they passed. Or she’d be sunbathing topless on the lawn and ask him to rub some sun oil on her back.

  Pal didn’t know what to do. How do you tell your father something like that? And things weren’t so good between them anyway. I think Daddy had some crazy notion of his boy making good in the business world and wresting back control of the old family firm, but from an early age Pal made it clear he wasn’t interested in that kind of work. He never took to rock climbing either or game shooting, and sometimes he’d deliberately put on a real Irish brogue and say he supported the IRA just to get up Daddy’s nose. So now when he’d have really liked to be able to talk to Daddy, it was pretty well impossible, especially on this subject. So he had to suffer in silence and when he did let his antagonism towards Kay show, Daddy would tear a strip off him for his bad manners!

  And there was another complication.

  Pal genuinely found Kay’s behaviour repellent, I’m sure of that. But he was a young man, full of rising sap, and though he’d never admit it, I could see that despite himself he found it exciting too. It all came to climax, literally, one day when she followed him into the shower. From the sound of it she intended to go the whole way, but for once she underestimated her powers of provocation and he climaxed before she could get him into her.

  This time I was hot for him to tell Daddy but still he wouldn’t. He was too deeply shamed. That’s something you have to understand about Pal. He could come across as pretty laid-back, even cynically amoral, but underneath it all he was a good caring human being. I know that sounds like sentimental hokum, but I can’t think of any other way of putting it. Anyway, he made me promise I’d keep my mouth shut too, and I did. But only as far as Daddy was concerned. I’d made no promise about not talking to Kay and I confronted her one day and told her loud and clear what I thought of her and I made it plain that if I ever got the slightest hint she was sniffing around Pal again, I’d tell the world, damn the consequences.

  And that was it. After that it was Cold War between us. I did my best to be polite when Daddy was around but he must have noticed the chilly atmosphere. Fortunately Pal went up to Cambridge soon afterwards (to read Art History, which Daddy made clear he thought was a waste of time), and with me away at school it was easy to keep contact down to a minimum. But I guess she knew the game was up as far as we were concerned and decided her best bet was to get out of the marriage with maximum profit to herself before one of us let the world know the kind of depraved bitch she was. I think the first thing she did was turn off the sex with Daddy, to put him in the right frame of mind for a generous divorce settlement. I can’t say this definitely of course. It’s not the kind of thing a man like my father would discuss with his teenage daughter. But I could see they were all over each other in the first two or three years. I remember being horrified at the thought that she might get pregnant. Her baby around the house! God, what a prospect! And I’m sure Daddy was dead keen to start a new family with her. But it never happened. I suspect that Kay made damn sure it never would happen!

  Anyway, eventually I could see things had really cooled between them. I was at home for the spring half-term
and Daddy definitely wasn’t himself. He was distracted, worried, angry, frustrated, all kinds of things. God knows what she was putting him through, but it was something he was finding it hard to deal with.

  I went back to school. I talked with Pal on the phone. He said he’d try to get home and have a chat with Daddy, though he didn’t hold out much hope. Daddy wasn’t a man for heart-to-hearts. He rang me back a week or so later. He said he’d been home but it turned out Daddy was away for a couple of days. I think Kay might have come on to him again but he didn’t want to talk about it on the phone. But he said he was writing to Daddy, putting him straight about the bitch, and he wanted me to be ready to back him up in case Daddy looked to me for confirmation. Like I say, I was ready and willing. Then only a couple of days later I was called to the head’s study and given the news.

  Kay had taken off to America with Helen and Daddy had blown his brains out.

  Oh, I know that she claimed it was just a trip arranged with Daddy’s full co-operation and she’d have been back by Easter, but it fell very convenient. When I saw Pal, he confirmed what I’d guessed, that something had happened when he went home earlier in the month. She’d made another big play for him. Once again he’d threatened to tell Daddy, and this time he’d gone through with it. But he suspected that Kay for once had taken his threat seriously and got in first with some story that made him out a sex-crazed monster.

  Well, it must have all blown Daddy’s mind. Generally he was a tightly controlled man, screwing down the hatches to keep everything inside. But sometimes you knew that all this containment meant was that the explosion was going to be nuclear when it came. I don’t know what was going on in his mind. Who can ever tell about anyone? But I do know he ended up alone in this house. Kay was gone. Perhaps he doubted if she’d ever come back. And with her she’d taken our kid sister.