Bones & Silence (12 page)

'Three reasons. One: we promised Chung we'd get him there and this guarantees it.'

'Why are you so concerned about pleasing Chung when it's Andy who's your chum?' she inquired with one of those elenctic U-turns that so often left Pascoe facing the wrong way.

'Come on! You were in on the arm-twisting!' he accused.

'That was before I knew it was going to cost us fifty quid,' said Ellie. 'Let the sod get a taxi with his rake-off!'

Pascoe, uncomfortable in his role of Judas goat leading Dalziel towards Godhead, had been easy meat when the fat man had started touting his tickets to the Mayor's Ball. 'It's for a good cause,' he'd protested to Ellie. 'It's conspicuous charity,' she'd retorted. 'If all those fascist ego-trippers
just
gave the ticket money to the Hospice Fund, plus what they'll probably spend on new outfits, booze, getting there, etc., we could all have two beds to die in!'

'Second reason,' said Pascoe. 'You've never actually penetrated the monster's lair. Now's your chance!'

When Dalziel returned hospitality, he took you to a pub or a restaurant. Ellie could not deny her often expressed curiosity about his unimaginable home life.

'All right,' she said. 'That's two. So let's hear the third.'

'If two are good enough, that's a majority,' he said evasively.

'Don't be smart, Peter. It doesn't sit right on a Chief Inspector. What's three?'

'In a minute. We're almost there.'

Suddenly he gave a loud double blast on his horn, causing Ellie to jump.

'What was that for?' she demanded.

Thought I saw a cat,' he said vaguely, turning left, then left again almost immediately.

'Are we lost?'

'No. Here it is.' He pulled up and got out, looking at his watch.

'We've plenty of time,' said Ellie. 'Is this really it? I was expecting something a little more gothic.'

'You really ought to watch more old movies. When he's abroad, all he needs is a coffin full of earth from his native Transylvania.'

Dalziel flung open the door at the first ring of the bell. He was immaculate in white shirt, red and green striped tie, and a suit of superb cut in a high quality charcoal grey worsted. For an unhappy moment Pascoe thought that he was ready for an immediate departure, then he noticed he was barefooted.

'Ellie, what fettle?' he said heartily. 'It's been a long time.'

'Hello, Andy,' she replied. 'You're looking very smart.'

'The suit, you mean? Man with a good suit can go anywhere, isn't that what they say? Come away in. Take your coat off, Ellie, so you'll feel the benefit. By God, you don't look so bad yourself. Just wait till I get you up at the Mayor's Ball. We'll show these young 'uns a thing or two!'

Pascoe blew his nose violently in a vain effort to smother his snort of laughter at this coetaneous assumption. Ellie glared at him and Dalziel said, 'Help yourselves to booze. I'll not be long.'

The room they were left in was small and square and contained a three-piece suite in uncut moquette; a fourteen-inch television; a glass-fronted cabinet with a Queen Anne style tea service; a Victorian commode; a marble fireplace polished to look like plastic; a mantel bearing a stopped carriage clock, two brass candlesticks, three brass monkeys, and a chipped ashtray inscribed
A Present from Bridlington
; above the fireplace hung a round mirror in need of resilvering which interrupted the flight of three china ducks across a sky-blue wallpaper trellissed with pink dog-roses.

'It's like a BBC set for a fifties play,’ said Ellie, running a finger delicately along the mantel. It came up dustless.

'He probably has a woman who comes in and does,' said Pascoe.

'Just like you, eh? Where's this booze he told us to help ourselves to?'

Pascoe opened the commode. It was packed full of glasses and bottles, all whisky, some single malts, some blended. He poured from one picked at random and handed a glass to Ellie. Then he glanced at his watch again.

'Peter, settle down. It's an informal do, it doesn't matter what time we get there within reason.'

'Lad getting impatient, is he?' said Dalziel, coming into the room. 'He's quite right, though. When the booze is free, don't be backward about coming forward.'

'All right if you're not driving,' said Pascoe. 'In fact, start as I mean to go on, could you put a spot of water in this, sir?'

He handed his glass to Dalziel, who wore the expression of a priest asked by a communicant for a little salt on his wafer. Then, shaking his head sadly, he left the room.

'Dilution does not affect blood alcohol level,' Ellie began to lecture, but her audience was in the process of following his host out of the room.

'Come to make sure I drown it?' growled Dalziel at the kitchen sink.

'Just a drop,' said Pascoe placatingly. 'So this is where you were that night?'

'What?' Oh aye.'

'And you were in the dark?' Pascoe flicked the light switch up and down a couple of times, leaving it off.

'That's right.'

'You never said what you were doing. I mean, do you spend a lot of time just standing here in the dark?'

'I do what I bloody well like in my own house.'

'Yes, of course. My God. What's that?' exclaimed Pascoe.

In the first floor of the house immediately behind a light had come on in a room with the curtains open. A man stood before the open window, brandishing something in his right hand.

'Bloody hell!' said Dalziel. 'What the fuck's going on?'

Pascoe opened the kitchen door and both men pressed out into the yard. A second man appeared. There seemed to be a brief struggle and he was pushed away.

'Come on,' said Dalziel, setting off down the yard. Distantly Pascoe heard a muffled bang and he went after the fat man, cursing as he hit obstacles that Dalziel seemed able to plough through.

Out of the gate, across the alley, into the garden of the house on Hambleton Road; the back door was unlocked; through the kitchen, up the stairs; Pascoe's leg was aching badly and it was all he could do to keep up, but he was close behind as the Super burst into the bedroom.

A man in a dark blue blazer with a starting pistol in his hand stood by the window. Another man in a black roll neck sweater crouched by the wall. And on the bed, imperturbable as ever, sat Sergeant Wield.

Dalziel spun round to face Pascoe.

'What's this, lad?' he said softly. 'Games evening, is it?'

Pascoe smiled wanly. In the five days since Swain's release, nothing had happened. Dalziel was unrelenting in his belief that Swain was involved in his wife's death far beyond the admission of moral responsibility made in his statement. While not denying a strong intuitive antipathy for the man, he claimed his conviction was based firmly on the evidence of his own eyes. The fact that Waterson's statement in so far as it differed from Swain's tended to place even less blame at his door didn't impress Dalziel in the least. Give him ten minutes with Waterson, he said, and he'd soon alter that. But, perhaps fortunately, Waterson had managed to disappear without trace, and the daily sight of Swain supervising the car park extension was clearly such an irritant that Pascoe had begun to fear his superior might say or do something more than normally outrageous.

Thus it had seemed a good idea to see if he could provoke bit of self-doubt in the fat man by staging this 'reconstruction'.

Now all at once it didn't seem like such a good idea after all.

'Just a bit of reconstruction, sir, to get timings right,' he said brightly.

'Reconstruction? Then you ought to do it properly. I didn't see any tart flashing her tits in the moonlight.'

'No. Sorry, sir. Short on tarts. But in other respects, how was it?'

Dalziel looked at him with speculation edging anger out of his eyes. Then he let his gaze drift from the man with the gun to the man by the wall.

'You want me to say that Constable Clark there with the gun was the man I saw first, don't you? But I don't think he was. I think it was the other way round, it was Billings I saw first and they've switched the gun. Right?'

'Sorry, sir. But no, it was Clark.'

'But it was me you saw with him, not Billings,' said Wield.

Dalziel stared at the sergeant, who was wearing a dark grey leather bomber jacket.

'And it wasn't a gun Clark was carrying but this.'

Pascoe picked up a pipe from the bed.

'Clever,' said Dalziel. 'But neither Swain nor Waterson smoke pipes, do they? And I still heard the gun go off
after
I saw Swain holding it.'

Pascoe thought: This is one step forward, two back! He said, 'Like tonight?'

'Aye, the same sequence.'

'Yes, sir. Only they fired the starting pistol
before
Clark appeared at the window. The bang we heard afterwards was Dennis Seymour with a paper bag in the garden shed.'

There was a long and dreadful silence.

'All right, you buggers,' said Dalziel finally. 'So you reckon you've proved I'm as unreliable as any other witness, eh? Well, prove away, but I know what I know. This was your idea, was it, Peter? I always had you down as clever but I never had you down as unkind. No need to make a fool of people when all you've got to do is ask.'

Oh Christ, thought Pascoe. Vicious anger he'd been prepared for but not pained reproach.

He said, 'I'm sorry, sir, but I thought the element of surprise

'Oh, it's a surprise right enough, Peter. I'll remember you like surprises. And I'll tell you another thing you got wrong.'

He swung to face Wield.

'That tart on the bed even with her face shot off was a bloody sight prettier than
him!'

He left, banging the door behind him.

Wield looked at Pascoe, then began to smile.

'Thought we'd really upset him there,' he said.

'Me, too,' said Pascoe. 'But I'll tell you what. I'm not going to stand near the edge of any station platforms for a bit!'

By the time they got to the Kemble, Dalziel's good humour was almost completely restored by Ellie's sympathetic hearing of 'the daft tricks that clever bugger she'd married had been up to'. But the truce was rudely shattered when they entered the theatre foyer and the first person they saw was Philip Swain.

'What's this? Have you got me here for more games, Peter?' snarled Dalziel, stopping dead.

Pascoe, with cause enough for guilt at entrapping the fat man, could only stutter a most unconvincing denial which Dalziel brushed aside as he advanced towards Swain and demanded, 'What the hell are you doing here?'

Swain, who had paused at the cloakroom to remove an elegant overcoat, lost none of his composure.

'Superintendent, good evening,' he said. 'What am I doing here? My wife was something of a patron of the drama and I feel I owe it to her memory to keep up that support. More to the point, what are
you
doing here? I shouldn't have thought it was your scene.'

He let his gaze drift across a poster advertising
Hedda Gabler,
which had just finished, to one advertising a post-London one-woman show based on Virginia Woolf which was opening next day, then back to Dalziel.

'Oh, I like a bit of good acting as well as the next man,' said Dalziel.

'What on earth is all this about?' Ellie whispered in Pascoe's ear.

That's this guy Swain Dalziel's so het up about.'

'Oh, Peter, you
didn't
arrange for him to be here, did you?' she said in a tone of indignation which, considering the conspiracy she and Chung had embroiled him in, took Pascoe's breath away.

Swain moved away up the stairs to the bar area where the party was being held and the Pascoes joined Dalziel to hand their topcoats in. He glowered at Pascoe and said, 'Is that it for the evening, lad? Or is Desperate Dan waiting up there to tell me I've been busted back to the beat?'

'Ha-ha,' laughed Pascoe inanely. Ellie dug her elbow in his ribs and led Dalziel forward to where at the head of the stairway Chung was receiving her guests.

'Ellie, darling, glad you could come. And Pete, honey, you too. And who is this? Is this he, the one, the only? O brave new world that has such creatures in it!'

'How do, missus,' said Dalziel. 'By God, you're a big 'un!'

'I love him already,' said Chung. 'Andy, may I call you Andy? You haven't got a drink. There's plonk for the herd, but you don't look like a plonk man. Won't you join me at the bar?'

'Depends on the price of admission,' said Dalziel, heavily jocular.

'Only your soul,' she said. 'But you get to drink Highland Park. Incidentally they've got spirit glasses like eggcups here. Can you make do with a half-pint tumbler?'

'I can mebbe force myself,' said Dalziel.

'Putty in her hands,' said Ellie as Dalziel was led away.

'She'll need big hands, that's a lot of putty,' said Pascoe. 'She seems to have been well briefed, though. I wonder who her mole can be?'

Ellie said defensively, 'It's common knowledge he likes his Highland Park.'

'Try telling that to the judge! I notice it doesn't seem to be common knowledge that I too would not object to a spot of the Highland Park.'

'Better stick to the Highland Spring,' Ellie advised. 'Remember, it's your turn to drive home. That fellow Swain certainly seems to know everybody.'

Pascoe followed her gaze. Swain was talking very much at home with a group among whom Pascoe recognized the President of the Chamber of Commerce, the Council Leader, and their wives.

'Old family,' he said, echoing the awful Mitch.

'Do
you
think he killed his wife?' asked Ellie.

'There's no hard evidence,' said Pascoe. 'In fact no evidence at all except what Andy says he saw.'

'Which you were trying to explode earlier? Well, I'd say he looks to me the type who might well have killed his wife, but he's quite dishy in a dangerous kind of way. Poor chap, I feel quite sorry for him.'

Pascoe sighed and said mildly, 'I should have thought you might have targeted your sorrow on the wife.'

'Oh, her. I think I remember her vaguely now I come to think of it. She must have been the one who came to a couple of Arts Committees. American. Pushy. Capitalist. Neurotic. Always bound for a bad end.'