Midnight Fugue (25 page)

In the end she got rather annoyed with his insistent questioning and said, ‘Look, Mick, I’m not in one of your interview rooms, OK? I’ve told you what happened and the net result, so far as I can see, is that I’ve got another boozed-up cop snoring in my bed!’

‘You’ve never complained before,’ he said.

‘That’s not funny.’

‘No. Sorry. Listen, I’ll talk to Andy when he wakes up…’

‘To get a truly professional picture, you mean? The things I’ve missed, or maybe the things he’s not telling me?’

‘Hey, don’t be so sensitive. We’re cops, we speak the same language, that’s all. Listen, what are you doing now?’

‘I’m sitting in the hotel garden talking to you on my phone.’

‘That’s fine. Good idea to stay there, don’t go wandering off. Look, I need to finish stuff here, than I’ll get back to you…’

‘No need. I’m perfectly capable of managing myself. And you sound like you could do with getting your head down for a couple of hours at least.’

‘Couple of days would be better. Listen, keep in touch. And remember what I say. Until we’re sure what’s going off here, be careful. Don’t go wandering off by yourself.’

Maybe she should have been touched by his concern, but all it did was irritate her.

What right did he have to start dishing out instructions? So he was worried on her behalf. How much more worried would he have been if she’d told him about her several
sightings
of Alex, both the obviously fallacious ones this morning, and especially the much more powerful image she’d glimpsed just before Dalziel dropped the water jug.

This was one of the reasons she’d come into the garden, to stare at the space the image had briefly occupied in hope of recreating it.

It didn’t work. She looked at her watch. Two o’clock. The christening party looked as if it was breaking up. Dalziel would soon have had his half-hour, but she suspected he might need a little more. Dissatisfied with herself and also with the tone of her conversation with Mick she rose from the bench she was sitting on and headed for the car park. Aimlessly driving around wasn’t going to advance matters but at least it was doing something in a world where men expected her to do nothing without their imprimatur.

It was of course totally non-productive. This time she didn’t even imagine she’d spotted Alex. So finally at half past three she’d returned to her room, not in the mood to make any allowances whatsoever if she found the fat slob still in her bed, which of course he was.

The shower soothed her bodily and mentally. As she was towelling herself down she heard the phone ringing in the bedroom. Checking first that the Fat Man had definitely gone, she picked up the receiver and said, ‘Hello?’

There was no reply, just a faint sound of breathing.

She said, ‘Room 25, who is this, please?’

Distantly a voice said, ‘Gina?’

She froze.

After a while the voice said, ‘Gina, you there?’

She managed to relax her throat muscles sufficiently to say, ‘Alex, is that you?’

Now it was the caller’s turn to pause. When he finally spoke, he said, ‘Yes, it’s me,’ but hesitantly, like a witness whose certainties begin to crumble in the witness box.

Gina heard the doubt and forced herself to restrain the torrent of questions welling up in her head.

She said, ‘Alex, it’s so good to hear your voice. Where are you? Can we meet?’

Another long silence made her wonder if even that had been a question too far, then the voice said, ‘Why are you here?’

She said, ‘Someone sent me the photo of you in
MY Life
magazine.’

‘Photo? Which photo?’ He sounded puzzled, with a faint note of alarm.

She said reassuringly, ‘The photo of you in the crowd during the royal visit last week. I thought it might be you who’d sent it. You were right at the front, I knew at once it was you. Like I did when I saw you today, in the garden at the Keldale.’

Silence. Am I losing him? she wondered. Again.

Then he spoke and for the first time the voice was that of the man she’d married: alert, positive, forceful.

‘Gina, what are you driving?’

‘A Nissan 350Z. Red.’

‘Give me your mobile number.’

She obeyed.

‘Now get out of there. Check out and leave. Drive north. Leave your phone switched on. I’ll be in touch. Gina, don’t hang about!’

The phone went dead.

She sat on the bed because her legs had lost all strength. Despite everything she’d done since getting the photo, everything she’d said to Mick and to Dalziel, in her heart she’d refused to believe that Alex could really be alive. Even all those ‘sightings’ of him had been good. The ones she knew for certain were false reinforced the chances that the ones that were doubtful were false too.

And now she’d heard his voice. Could that be a delusion too? She wanted it to be. Over the past seven years she’d built up a barrier against all the pain of that time of loss, she’d buried it as deep, so she thought, as the small white coffin. But now she knew — had known as soon as she saw the photo — that the barrier she’d built wasn’t the sturdy bulwark clad in tempered steel of adamantean proof she’d imagined, but a rice-paper wall a dead child could poke a finger through.

She felt herself on the edge of the state of shock, but she must not succumb, not while there was still doubt. There were questions to ask. Questions were good. They forced the mind to work at seeking answers.

First, was it really Alex?

Every instinct told her it was. The voice was his.

He had offered no proof of identity, but even that was a kind of proof.

Yet he didn’t seem to know anything about the photo.

So that was a maybe.

Second, why had he told her to check out?

She recalled Dalziel’s suggestion that maybe someone else had a reason for getting her up here. She hadn’t taken it all that seriously, but now…

That might explain Alex’s alarm, his desire to get her out of there.

Or could it be that someone else was keen to get her out in the open?

She thought of ringing Mick, but what good would that do? She could formulate his response without bothering with the conversation.
Don’t so anything, stay put, contact Andy Dalziel, he’ll know what to do
.

Perhaps he would. But she didn’t need external input into her decision. Which in fact wasn’t a decision.

She didn’t have a choice.

She had never been a subservient wife. She’d once told Alex, if he wanted instant obedience, he should have become a dog-handler. But now she saw no way forward but to assume it was his voice she’d heard and to obey his instructions. The only way to settle all doubts was to see him face to face. To do anything that might drive him back into his hidey-hole, whether it were mental or physical, was not an option. She’d lived through uncertainty into certainty once. It had been a slow painful journey and it wasn’t one that she wanted to have to start making again.

She rang Reception, told them she was checking out and asked them to charge everything to the credit card they’d swiped on her arrival. Then she got dressed, bundled the rest of her stuff into her case and headed out, descending by the service lift that deposited her next to a door opening on to the car park.

She slotted her mobile into the Bluetooth connection and drove away from the hotel. He’d said drive north so she turned right to keep the sun on her left. At last her Brownie days were coming in useful!

After a few minutes the phone rang.

‘Where are you?’ he said.

It was Alex. She was sure of it. Wasn’t she?

She said, ‘I’m on the outskirts of town. There’s a roundabout ahead. Left is Leeds and Harrogate, right Scarborough, straight on Middlesbrough.’

‘Carry straight on. Don’t disconnect.’

Other instructions followed at regular intervals. Soon she was off the main highway into a maze of narrow country roads passing through hamlets whose names meant nothing to her. She would have been completely lost had not her Brownie fix on the sun told her she was now to the east of her starting point and heading south. Finally after three quarters of an hour she was told to turn west on to a road which ran arrow-straight between low hedges of burnished hawthorn. By her rough geographical calculations, if she carried on in this direction for four or five miles, she would intersect with the main north — south motorway she’d started out on. She’d worked out that the purpose of all this meandering was to shake off any possible pursuit. Well, she hadn’t seen another car either in front or behind for miles, so perhaps now he was simply directing her back to town.

A mile or so ahead the narrow road breasted a steep hill on whose summit silhouetted against the declining sun she could see a building. As she got nearer she could see an inn sign swaying in a gentle breeze.

At the foot of the hill he told her to stop and wait.

She obeyed.

Time passed. Five minutes. Ten. Half an hour. Nothing happened. No traffic overtook her, none came towards her. With each passing minute her certainty that it was Alex’s voice faded. She wound down the window. There was no sound except for the call of a single bird, far away, repeating the same phrase over and over again. She tried to analyse it musically but it defied annotation. It had no connection with humanity. It belonged in a world where all the humans were dead. She felt totally alone. Abandoned.

It hadn’t been Alex. It was nobody. And nobody was going to call.

She would sit here till it got dark, and then she would…

She didn’t know what she would do.

16.35–16.41

Once more Andy Dalziel drove into the car park of the Keldale Hotel but this time his mood was very different. Last time he’d been anticipating a leisurely al fresco lunch with a good-looking woman who’d presented him with an intriguing little mystery, just the right size to take his mind off his own troubles.

He’d felt completely justified in keeping the whole daft business to himself. Involving an off-duty Novello had seemed harmless enough. Of all his DCs, she was the one whose discretion he most trusted. She was very ambitious and therefore unlikely to risk his wrath by shooting her mouth off. The same could be said of the lads, when sober, but after a few jars down the Black Bull he wouldn’t trust any of them to keep their mouths shut about their boss’s dalliance with a beddable blonde!

Before the bomb, it wouldn’t have bothered him. A man with a hide like a rhinoceros doesn’t fear pinpricks of laughter. A rhino might look a bit comic wandering around among all them elegant antelopes, but let him turn his sagacious eye in your direction, and you soon stop smiling.

On his return to work, however, he found that Mid-Yorkshire, which had once stretched around him like the wild savannah, had contracted to an enclosure at the zoo. People were now looking at the beast with curiosity, or, worse, with pity.

So they had to be re-educated.

Back to basics first; keep them guessing what you’re up to, make them jump a bit, remind them you’re answerable to nobody but yourself. Respect! Wasn’t that the cant word these days? Get some respect!

After this morning’s visit to the Station, he felt he’d taken a good stride in the right direction. He’d come to the Keldale at midday feeling more like his old self than he had for a long time.

And now as he drove into the car park, he felt like a petty recidivist crook returning to the scene of his pathetic crime.

Pascoe was certainly treating it as a crime scene. He’d upgraded the search of Gina Wolfe’s room to full SOCO examination.

‘You sort that, Wieldy,’ he’d commanded as if his commanding officer were not present. ‘But first off, get on to Seymour and tell him to make sure Mrs Wolfe’s room is left untouched. Don’t want a chambermaid getting in there and stripping the bed, do we?’

Stripping the bed? Was that a crack? wondered Dalziel.

‘You’re still giving the room the once-over, are you, Pete?’ he said. ‘Mebbe I should take a look first afore SOCO gets to work.’

‘Why’s that, Andy?’

‘Because I’ve been there, remember? Could be I’d spot summat.’

It had sounded weak and Pascoe hadn’t bothered to try and smooth over the fact.

‘Oh, I see. Maybe you’d notice a subtle change out of the corner of your eye, some slight discrepancy that would eventually turn out to be the clue that cracks the case, like in one of Agatha’s novels? No, I think on the whole it might be best for all our sakes if you weren’t around when the CSIs start poking about.’

Best for all our sakes
? That was definitely a crack!

‘Why? What do you think they’re going to find? Semen stains on the sheets?’

Pascoe shrugged and said, ‘I just need to be sure there’s nothing to find, OK?’

‘Listen,’ said Dalziel, ‘I told you, I were knackered. Not fit to drive. I dossed down by myself. For Christ’s sake, if Gina had been there, whatever else I gave her, I’d have given her an alibi, wouldn’t I? And you’d not be wasting time with this daft notion that she might have blown Watkins’s face off and put Novello in hospital.’

Pascoe had looked at him with half a smile and said, ‘No need to get your knickers in a twist. All right, if you’re so desperate to go back, let’s go. Wieldy, you keep an eye on things here, OK? Anything comes up, ring me.’

‘As opposed to keeping it all to myself, you mean?’ said the sergeant ironically.

‘Why not? Seems to be in fashion nowadays,’ said Pascoe.

They weren’t going to leave it alone, thought Dalziel. And he couldn’t complain, he had it coming.

Pascoe, who’d parked alongside him, was out of his car already and opening his boss’s door for him.

‘Come on, Andy,’ he said impatiently. ‘Work to do.’

This was too much. Pascoe had followed him to the hotel. Followed, not led the way, thought Dalziel. Like he was scared I was going to do a runner. Time he had a little reminder of the divine order of things.

God seemed to agree. Even as the Fat Man looked for a way to slow things to his own pace, the good Lord sent him one.

‘Here,’ he said, looking across the car park to where a man was putting a suitcase into a BMW X5, ‘I know yon face.’