D&P21 - Good Morning, Midnight

by Reginald Hill

  “But this isn’t how you see it?”

  “Jake knew his way around computers. He wasn’t the kind of guy who goes poking about inside one with the power still on.”

  “Overconfidence can kill too.”

  “That’s what Jim Collaboy said. Like I say, I suggested the absence of back-up disks was suspicious, but he didn’t seem much bothered. One other thing. There was a digital camera in a desk drawer. I checked the images. Meant nothing except the last one. It was a photo of a man and woman caught with their pants down, so to speak. Didn’t recognize her, but the fellow looked a lot like our Dr Lockridge. Probably not relevant unless …”

  “Ah,” said Pascoe. “You’ve not seen Mrs Maciver, have you?”

  “No,” said Wield.

  “Let me introduce you.”

  Pascoe produced the evidence bag in which he’d put the ripped photograph.

  “Ooh,” said Novello over his shoulder. “Bet that hurt.”

  Dalziel, who’d been quieter longer than anyone could remember, grabbed the picture and said, “Soft porn, is it now? Right, Pete, fill us in, unless it’s a secret.”

  “You know me, sir, I don’t believe in secrets,” said Pascoe, meeting his gaze unflinchingly. “A woman, Mary Lockridge, I believe, delivered this to Sue-Lynn Maciver this morning. Along with a good right hook. It’s very interesting, but I don’t see where it gets us. Now we probably know why Maciver really hired Gallipot. To check his wife out. Not without reason.”

  “Found out she were playing away, balance of mind upset, tops himself,” said Dalziel hopefully.

  “Don’t think so, sir,” said Pascoe. “Maciver doesn’t strike me as that type. No, I see it as a contraindication. The time and date indicate this was taken ’round about the very time Maciver was dying. Frankly I wouldn’t imagine a man contemplating suicide would give much of a damn what his wife’s getting up to. I can’t really see what it can have to do with our case.”

  “But it might help in looking for someone with a motive for killing Gallipot,” said Novello. “Sarge, this guy you said was seen leaving the building, could it have been Lockridge?”

  “Which guy was this?” demanded Pascoe. “You’ve been doing house-to-house as well, have you, Wieldy?”

  “No,” denied Wield. “Jim Collaboy put one of his lads on to asking questions round the other offices. He reported in when I was at the station. Someone looking out of the window spotted someone leaving the building, description, male, wearing a hat—a trilby, she thought. Didn’t pay much heed and looking down from the first floor doesn’t give the best view anyway. But no one in any of the offices recalled having dealings with a guy in a trilby that morning.”

  “I’m sure I’ve seen Dr Lockridge in a trilby,” said Novello. “So maybe …”

  “Forget Lockridge,” interrupted Pascoe. “I was talking to him at the hospital this morning, so unless he’s got wings …”

  Novello subsided, looking crestfallen at having her theory shot down so comprehensively.

  “Mr Waverley wears a trilby,” said a low and hesitant voice.

  It was Hat Bowler. When all eyes turned his way, he looked like he wished he’d kept it a bit lower and hesitated a bit longer.

  “Is that a riddle, lad? Or a message from the other side?” asked Dalziel long-sufferingly. “Who the fuck is Mr Waverley?”

  Bowler looked so unhappy that Pascoe took pity.

  “He’s a friend of Miss Lavinia Maciver,” he said. “But how do you know him, Hat?”

  Dalziel shot Bowler a glance like an Olympic shot-putt and said, “Well, tell the DCI, lad.”

  Hesitantly and ignoring a bit of eye-rolling from Novello, Hat gave an account of his acquaintance with Lavinia. Her he spoke of with undisguised enthusiasm.

  “But all I know about Mr Waverley is that he’s an old friend. He came to tell her about her nephew’s death. Oh, and he’s a retired VAT inspector.”

  “That’s definitely a strike against him,” said Dalziel. “But we’ll need a bit more if we’re going to fit him up for murder. Is there more?”

  “He got a phone call when I was there this morning, and he left straight after,” persisted Hat.

  “Oh aye? And you managed to hear this call, did you?”

  “Not really. You see, he was out in the garden and I was eating a bit of toast and Scuttle was chattering away on my shoulder ‘cos he wanted a bit …”

  “Scuttle?”

  “He’s a coal-tit …”

  Dalziel hid his face behind his hand and rubbed it as if trying to raze his nose.

  “A coal-tit,” he syllabled softly. “Did you get its address?”

  “It lives at Miss Mac’s …” began Bowler, then let his voice fade away.

  “Of course it does. With Noddy and Big Ears. That it, lad? Or do you have owt that comes within pissing distance of suspicious?”

  Bowler racked his brain. All the brownie points he’d won with Dalziel by his discovery of the Dolores recording seemed to be sliding away.

  “There was something …” he said. “But it’s probably nothing really … It’s just that Mr Waverley sounds ever so faintly Scottish, only when he started talking just for a second he sounded, I don’t know, Australian …”

  “Australian?” said Dalziel, fanning himself with a file as if all this was bit too much for his delicate constitution. “Having a conversation with a kookaburra, were he?”

  “No,” said Bowler defiantly. “I heard him say “Good day” when he answered his phone, but it came out the way Aussies say it. Gedye.”

  For a fleeting moment Pascoe saw the ghost of a reaction drift across Dalziel’s face, then it was gone.

  “Well, gedonyer, cobber,” he said in a dreadful approximation of Oz-speak. “Now would you like to flap your wings and rejoin us in the real world? Ivor, your turn.”

  Pascoe, taken aback by the force of Dalziel’s put-down and irritated by Novello’s ill-disguised Schadenfreude, said rather sharply, “Yes, let’s hear what entertaining discoveries you’ve made, Shirley.”

  Unfazed, Novello, in a style which attempted with some success to emulate Wield’s, told the story of her adventures among the bankers, lawyers and Avenue ladies.

  Impressed despite himself, Pascoe said, “Well done, Shirley. Now that is interesting,” aware that Dalziel’s eyes were watching him under a brow louring like a typhoon sky.

  He’s daring me to make assumptions or even build hypotheses, thought Pascoe. Well, let the old sod wait!

  He said briskly, “Now, where are we? Top-of-the-bill time. Must be your spot, sir.”

  Dalziel’s gaze modified from threatening to sardonic. He picked up his phone, dialled a number and passed it to Pascoe.

  “Have a listen,” he said.

  He put it to his ear, heard it ring, then the answer service clicked in.

  He listened.

  “’Allo, ’ere is Dolores your Lady of Pain …”

  “Pull your tongue back in afore someone steps on it,” said Dalziel. “It were the only number trying to make contact with Maciver’s shop, home and mobile around seven o’clock, which meant it should have been Jason Dunn. It were young Bowler here that spotted it—nice to see that once you shake the feathers out of his bonce, his brain’s as sharp as ever. We’ll make a real thief-taker of him yet …”

  This was as near to fulsome praise as you were likely to get from the Fat Man and Novello once again felt the injustice of it. Those phone records had been sent at her behest, she should have been the one to analyse them, she would have spotted the number and rung it, no bother …

  She was diverted from the treacherous path of might-have-been by her awareness that the DCI seemed to have gone mad.

  He had pressed the redial button and this time when the message bleep sounded, he said into the phone, “Oh hello, Miss Upshott. Peter Pascoe here, DCI Pascoe. Could you drop in to see me at your earliest convenience? Alternatively, I could call round at the vicarage to speak to you
there. Thank you.”

  The silence that followed was religious in its intensity and breakable only by God.

  “What the fuck was that all about?” demanded Dalziel.

  “It’s about Joker Jennison’s highly specialized powers of perception,” said Pascoe.

  When he’d completed his explanation, the Fat Man shook his head incredulously.

  “And you believe him? You don’t think this could be one of Joker’s little japes?”

  “I don’t know if I believe him or not,” said Pascoe. “But there’s a close connection between Miss Upshott and Maciver—the shop, the village—and if it is her, when she gets my message, she’ll be round here like a flash rather than risk me dropping in on her and her brother. And if it’s not, well, all we’ve got is one very puzzled Lady of Pain.”

  Novello, feeling rather ashamed at her resentment of Hat’s small triumph, now compensated by saying, “I think Joker could be right. There’s not much I’d trust his judgment on, but when it comes to female bums, I reckon we should take it as an expert opinion.”

  “You reckon?” said Dalziel. Then his face split in a salacious grin. “Here, it ’ud make a grand identity parade, but. We could sell tickets.”

  No one laughed and he grunted, “Please yourselves,” and continued with the story of his interview with Dunn.

  When he’d finished, Pascoe said, “Oh shit.”

  “Eh? Thought you’d have been glad. I still don’t know what it adds up to, but it’s been you from the start saying there’s more going off here than meets the eye.”

  “I was thinking of that poor girl in hospital. Does this have to come out, sir?”

  “Only if it’s relevant to your enquiries into Maciver’s death,” said Dalziel.

  In other words, if it’s suicide, we can sit on it. But if it’s murder …

  There were things to be got out into the open but the open didn’t include everyone present. Not even Edgar Wield.

  He sought for some courteously diplomatic way of suggesting that the meeting close and he and Dalziel be left to themselves, but before he could speak, the Castiglione of Mid-Yorkshire showed him how it should be done.

  “Right, you lot. Bugger off,” he growled. “Everyone except you, Pete.”

  As the other three made for the door, Dalziel called, “Ivor, you’ve earned a break, you and young Bowler both. He’s still on the panel officially so why don’t you ferry him down to the canteen and see if you can lure him back permanent with a mug of tea and a slice of summat tasty? But keep him off the millet. All that ornithology can send a young man blind.”

  When they were alone, Pascoe said, “Nice to see Bowler getting back to normal. Meeting Lavinia’s obviously done him a world of good.”

  “You reckon? Gives you a warm glow, does it?”

  “Well, yes, it does. And I hope it makes you happy too, sir,” said Pascoe.

  “Happy? Aye, it might have made me happy if I’d not had a call from Desperate Dan asking if the lad were back on the strength.”

  Pascoe turned this inside out looking for hermeneutic clues, gave up, and said, “You mean the Chief noticed him hanging around and wondered if he’d been signed off the sick list?”

  “No, I don’t bloody mean that. I mean that some mate of Dan’s at the Yard has been enquiring all unofficial like if DC Bowler was assisting in some delicate CID enquiry under the guise of being off sick.”

  This required even more consideration.

  “Why should the Yard be interested in Bowler?”

  “Not the Yard, dickhead. Some other bugger somewhere had enquired at the Yard for someone who was well placed to make a nice chummy call to Dan and put the question.”

  “Some other bugger …?”

  “Some other funny bugger is my guess,” said Dalziel grimly.

  In Dalziel-speak funny buggers meant anyone working in the shadowy realms of security, whether MI something, or Special Branch, or MoD, or some other area so penumbral it dare not speak its name.

  Pascoe was amazed.

  “But why on earth … I mean, what’s Bowler been up to that even the neurotics who run these outfits could misconstrue?”

  “You heard the lad. He’s been wandering round the woods and having breakfast with this bird lady and her feathered friends. Now it could be that she’s a key figure in a pigeon post network that’s going to take over after all electronic communication’s been nuked out of existence. He did say she don’t have a phone or a radio, didn’t he? But if it’s not that, what are we left with that’s set some funny bugger’s alarm-bell ringing?”

  Pascoe said, “The only connexion she’s got to anything vaguely official is she’s Pal Maciver’s aunt.”

  “Aye. And then there’s this VAT man, Waverley.”

  “But you just sat on Bowler for even suggesting as a long shot that he could be linked to anything … Ah …”

  “That’s right,” said Dalziel approvingly. “The lad’s keen as mustard and now he’s getting back to the land of the living, he’ll be eager to impress. Plus he seems to have taken a real shine to the bird lady. If this Waverley does have owt to do with the funny buggers’ interest, the last thing I want is young Bowler sticking his beak in and getting it snapped off. So, what did you reckon to Waverley?”

  “I took him at face value. Retired Customs and Excise, on a decent pension—drives a newish Jag, wears a mohair Crombie—so, fairly high-powered—uses a walking cane, heavy silver top—slightly favours his right leg.”

  “What’s his relationship with bird lady?”

  “Old friend, likes to take care of her. Physically she looked just a touch wobbly, arthritis maybe …”

  “MS,” interrupted Dalziel.

  “Hat told you that? Then maybe Waverley’s right, she does need looking after.”

  “Is that all? Nowt sexual?”

  “Who knows? People like them aren’t all over each other. Certainly emotional. They still address each other pretty formally—Mr W and Miss Mac—but that’s probably just a habit which helps preserve the equilibrium of a loving friendship. Look, sir, apart from the fact he wears a trilby, is there anything else to make us take a closer look at Waverley?”

  “Gedye,” said Dalziel.

  “And to you too, sir,” said Pascoe.

  “No. It’s a name. It’s the name of the funny bugger who got Dan’s old mate at the Yard asking questions about Bowler.”

  “Ah,” said Pascoe.

  “Ah so,” said Dalziel. “Any idea how they met? Not one of them tweeters, is he?”

  “Twitchers. Don’t think so … though she did say … yes! I knew there was something!”

  Detectives, like Quakers, had their Inner Light too and if you relaxed and didn’t fret about it too much, eventually it would bloom and effulge in speech.

  “What?”

  “It was at Moscow House. She said something about seeing or hearing the green woodpeckers the first time she and Waverley met. And she dragged him off to see if they were still in some beech tree which she said had been quite rotten ten years ago. Ten years … that would be at the time of the first Maciver suicide. That’s when she met him.”

  “At Moscow House? He never came up in the investigation.”

  “Why should he?” said Pascoe, then couldn’t resist adding, “And maybe you were too busy consoling the grieving widow to pay too much attention to irrelevant detail.”

  Dalziel gave him a look which reminded him belatedly that kicking some men when they were down could put you in a fair way to breaking your foot.

  Hastily he went on, “Look, sir, I’m still not clear precisely how any of this connects with my investigation of Pal Junior’s death, but one thing’s for sure, there’s definitely something here that needs investigating.”

  Dalziel sat silent, chins on chest, contemplating his crotch like some parodic Buddha. He still doesn’t want to give it up, thought Pascoe. He’s promised his dear friend Kay Kafka that all shall be well and all manne
r of thing shall be well, and he hates the idea of admitting he’s fallible. I know the feeling. But before I start admitting things, I want the facts.

  He pressed on, “One thing I need to know—not because I’m saying it’s relevant, but because sooner or later I’m going to have to know whether it’s relevant or not—and that’s the precise nature of your relationship with Mrs Kafka.”

  “Kay? You’ve not listened to the tape I gave you, then?”

  “Yes, I have. And it was very interesting. Very moving. But it doesn’t explain your attitude to her. Not fully anyway.”

  “You think I’m shagging her, is that it?”

  “No, I don’t,” said Pascoe with some irritation. “But there has to be something more, that’s clear.”

  Now the Fat Man smiled, almost approvingly.

  “The reason behind the reason behind the reason, eh? That’s the name of our game, lad. Always knew you had the real detective nose from the first time I saw you picking it.”

  This wasn’t altogether true—or if it were, the Fat Man had concealed his knowledge pretty well.

  “I’m flattered,” said Pascoe. “So?”

  “Confession time, is it?” said the Fat Man musingly. “Why not? Always felt there were a bit of the priest in you, Pete. But no sacrament without a noggin, eh?”

  He reached into his desk cupboard and produced a bottle of Highland Park and two tumblers. He filled them both, passed one across to Pascoe, half-emptied the other.

  “Are you sitting comfortable?” he asked. “Then I’ll begin.”

  20 • Dalziel

  Would you like it formal?

  Nay, never shake your gory locks at me, lad—I’ve seen the way you cross your sevens like a kraut—you love formal.

  Statement of Detective Superintendent Andrew Dalziel.

  Made in the presence of Detective Chief Inspector Peter Pascoe.