Midnight Fugue (26 page)

He set off with Pascoe in close attendance. As they approached, the man straightened up and looked round. He was an imposing figure, broad-shouldered, grey-haired, with a Roman emperor’s head and a nose to match.

‘How do, Hooky!’ boomed Dalziel. ‘Long time no see!’

Pascoe was a good reader of reaction and it struck him that this Roman emperor was reacting to Dalziel’s approach as if he’d just noticed Alaric the Visigoth trotting up the Appian Way.

Conclusion: he was a crook whose acquaintance with the Fat Man was purely professional. Question: what kind of crook was he, and could his presence here have anything to do with Gina Wolfe?

But even as the question formed in his mind he was revising his conclusion as Dalziel took the man by the hand and shook it vigorously.

‘So what are you doing here, Hooky? Bit off your patch. Can’t be official, else we’d have baked a cake or summat.’

The man managed a wan smile and said, ‘No, just a visit. Old chum’s daughter got married.’

‘Oh aye? Job, is he?’

‘No, no. Some of us do have friends outside the Force,’ said the man, his eyes straying to Pascoe, who coughed in the Fat Man’s ear.

‘Oh aye, I’m forgetting me manners. Hooky, this is Peter Pascoe, my DCI. Pete, drop a curtsey, this is Nye Glendower, king of the Cambrian cops!’

‘Good to meet you, sir,’ said Pascoe. ‘I’ve heard of you, of course.’

Aneurin Glendower, Chief Constable of the Cambrian Force. Not a household name outside of Wales, but one well known in police circles as a man of strong views who might rise even higher if he could find a PM on the same wavelength.

They shook hands and Glendower said, ‘You boys got something going on here? I noticed a bit of activity in the hotel.’

Seymour and a WPC. They couldn’t have caused much of a stir, but you didn’t get to be CC without having well-tuned sensors, thought Dalziel. He opened his mouth to reply, but Pascoe cut in.

‘Just a little local difficulty,’ he said breezily. ‘But we’d better get it sorted. Good to meet you, sir. Andy, when you’re ready…’

The bugger’s worried in case I shoot my mouth off! thought the Fat Man indignantly.

He said, ‘With you in a minute, lad. Us old buggers need the young ’uns to keep us on our toes, eh, Hooky? Sorry I didn’t know you were here. We could have cracked a bottle and had a chat about the good old days when we mattered.’

‘Yes. Would have been nice, Andy — not that I had much spare time. Got to shoot off now and burn a bit of midnight oil when I get home so that I’m up to speed when I hit the desk in the morning. Good to see you. Nice to meet you, too, Pascoe.’

He slammed his boot, got into the X5 and accelerated out of the car park.

‘He’s in a hurry to get home,’ said Pascoe.

‘Well, it’s Wales,’ said Dalziel. ‘Probably shuts at half past seven. Here, watch out!’

He pulled Pascoe out of the way of a white Mondeo backing out of its parking spot at speed. The middle-aged woman driver scowled at them, then sped off towards the exit.

‘Bloody women drivers,’ said the Fat Man, shaking his fist after it. ‘Most on ’em couldn’t push a pram straight.’

Racist and sexist in the same ten seconds, thought Pascoe. Nothing new there then, except it came across rather mechanically, as if the old sod were becoming a parody of himself. And all that stuff about the good old days when he mattered! He really should have taken a few more weeks convalescent leave. Or maybe months.

Or am I just behaving like Henry the Fifth looking for arguments to invade France?

But Glendower’s reaction had certainly contained something of the embarrassment of the successful man on meeting the one-time equal he’d left behind. In the past their leader’s national reputation had always been a source of pride to his colleagues in Mid-Yorkshire CID. Could the truth really be that he was regarded as a bit of a joke by the upwardly mobile, a cop who’d found his relatively low level, a grampus puffing his way around a small provincial pond?

Pascoe shook away the disloyal thoughts.

‘Let’s find Seymour,’ he said.

16.35–17.05

It had been a funny kind of day, thought Edgar Wield.

The unexpected appearance of Dalziel early that morning should have rung a warning bell. Looking back now, it seemed that there had been something a touch manic about the fat sod’s speech and demeanour, and there was that business about the old lady, Mrs Esmé Sheridan, ringing in with a complaint about a kerb-crawler, and giving a car number and description that pointed the finger at the Fat Man. But on the whole Wield had been happy to accept his arrival as evidence that normal service was about to be resumed.

That the superintendent had come back too early from convalescent leave the sergeant did not doubt. But when others, including Pascoe, had expressed concern as to whether the great man could ever truly get back to where he had been before, Wield had kept his counsel. In his eyes it was just a matter of time. The others saw it in terms of a champion boxer trying to make a come-back. He saw it in terms of Odysseus come to reclaim his kingdom.

He had sufficient self-awareness to acknowledge he might be emotionally biased.

Pascoe was very close to the Fat Man. Romantics — there are a few of those even in the modern police force — analysed this as a vicarious father/son relationship. Dalziel had no children, or at least none he acknowledged, and years ago Pascoe’s father had confirmed the distance between himself and his son by opting to emigrate to Australia with his eldest daughter and her family.

The Romantic analysis of the D and P relationship went something like this: as initial distrust and dislike had moderated, via reluctant acknowledgement of detective skill and technique, to mutual respect and even affection, the residual ability to get up one another’s noses had been rendered innocuous by subsumption into a quasi-familial mode. You may at times loathe your parents or kids, but that doesn’t get in the way of loving them.

Wield felt it was maybe a bit more complicated than that. What he was certain of was that he owed his own progress, perhaps even survival, to the Fat Man. He had congratulated himself for many years on the skill with which he’d concealed his gayness from his institutionally homophobic employers. It was only late on, around the time he decided — without marking the occasion with a ticker-tape parade — to come out, that he realized he’d never fooled Andy Dalziel. Looking back, he began to understand how much he’d benefited from the Fat Man’s protection. Nothing obvious involving civil rights and liberal declarations and such. Just an invisible circle drawn round him which said, He’s in here with me, touch him at your peril.

He’d never said thank you because he knew if he had, all he’d have got back was,
For what
? And indeed, for what? The right to function like any other copper? Surely he had that anyway. So, no thank yous. But what he did give the Fat Man was unconditional trust that, whatever he was, so would he always be.

Trust was one thing, reality another. There was no getting away from it, the way things had turned out today meant there was a big dark cloud hanging over Dalziel, and Wield doubted it was about to burst in blessings on his head. Nowt he could do but get on with his job.

He had disposed of the Duttas as the superintendent had suggested and now he was sitting collating statements from the other Loudwater Villas tenants.

The sound of a rackety engine caught his ears and he looked out of the caravan window to see a dusty white Bedford van pull up in front of the building.

A young man got out, early twenties, dressed in baggy jeans and a red T-shirt. He stretched his arms and yawned, then pulled a grip off the passenger seat and headed into the Villas.

Wield frowned. He’d set up a checkpoint on the approach road. They couldn’t keep people out who had a genuine reason for going in, such as, they lived here. But where there was doubt, the officer on duty would ring in to check; and where there was no cause for doubt, he would make a note and ring in with the details to indicate there was somebody new to interview.

None of the caravan phones had sounded in the last five minutes.

The sergeant said, ‘Smiler, who’s on the checkpoint?’

The constable so addressed, glanced at a list and said, ‘It’s Hector, Sarge. Everyone got called in for this one.’

The last sentence was significant.

In a case of murder accompanied by a serious assault on an officer, everyone was expected to turn out and help. Indeed, everyone wanted to turn out and help. But if Wield had been consulted, he’d have advised that the best way Police Constable Hector could help was to continue to devote himself to whatever unimaginable activity occupied his mind on his day off.

The sergeant rose and opened the caravan door. From this elevated position he could see down to the checkpoint quite clearly.

There was no one there.

The air was very still and a distant splash drew his attention down to the river bank. There he was, that unmistakable figure, lanky and skinny, with a head set slightly beneath the level of the shoulders, as though like a terrapin’s it could fully retract in time of trouble.

He was throwing stones into the water. No, on closer observation of the throwing style, it seemed likely he was trying to make stones skip across the surface of the water, only they never rose out of the initial splash.

This time I’ll kill him, thought Wield. But that pleasure would have to wait.

He jumped down from the caravan and headed into the building.

As he ran up the stairs he could hear raised voices drifting down from above.

He found their source on the second floor outside number 39.

The young man from the white van was having a row with PC Jennison, who was on guard outside the fatal flat. The SOCO team had finished and now its sole occupant was the faceless corpse waiting to be bagged and transported to the morgue. Joker Jennison had risked a peep and wished he hadn’t. Now the door was firmly closed and he was concentrating on his appointed task of keeping unauthorized personnel out.

At sixteen and a half stone, he formed a pretty effective barrier, but while he was winning the battle he was clearly being worn down by the argument and he spotted Wield’s arrival with relief.

‘Sarge,’ he called. ‘This gent says he wants to go inside and he won’t take no for an answer.’

‘No, I bloody well won’t!’ exclaimed the man, turning. ‘You in charge here? Then tell your pet ape to let me in.’

He had a lilting Welsh accent and a fiery Welsh tone.

‘I’ll do what I can, sir, but first why don’t we calm things down a touch, and take a close look at this thing together?’ said Wield.

His words were softly spoken and would have won plaudits in a bedside manner contest. But he knew it wasn’t his soft answers that turned away wrath but the agate-hard face they came out of.

‘Yes, all right, it’ll be good to talk to somebody who’s got two penn’orth of sense for a change,’ said the man, shooting a twelve-bore glance at Jennison.

He allowed himself to be led away to the far end of the corridor.

‘Now, sir, I’m Detective Sergeant Wield of Mid-Yorkshire CID,’ said Wield, producing his ID.

He let the man study it for a moment, then put it away and took out his notebook and pen, by these small rituals providing a space for the more volatile vapours of anger to dissipate.

‘OK, sir,’ he said, pen poised. ‘Could you start by giving me your full name and address, and then explain why you want to get into number 39?’

The man let out a long sigh, but his voice was relatively calm as he answered.

‘My name is Alun Gruffud Watkins,’ he said. ‘My address is Flat 39, Loudwater Villas. And I want to get inside because that’s where I bloody well live!’

16.00–16.30

Maybe I ought to play the lottery today, thought Maggie Pinchbeck. Clearly I’m on a roll.

Her first stroke of good fortune had been the timely phone call from Gwyn Jones.

The reasons for the Bitch’s anger had been made clear on the journey from the
Shah-Boat
to Marina Towers.

‘Family fucking emergency! His old gran seriously ill. Got to go back to fucking Wales to help sort things out. God, you could almost hear the tears in his voice! And all the time he’s heading up to Yorkshire chasing a story! Bastard! There’s got to be trust, hon. Once a man starts treating you like an idiot, that’s finito.’

Maggie noted that it wasn’t the lie that bothered her, it was the assumption she wasn’t smart enough to spot it.

It had been an easy job for Beanie to get Gareth Jones to repeat a full account of what he’d overheard when bugging the terrace table, almost as easy as it was for Maggie to get the Bitch to repeat the story.

‘Like any kid, he really wants to impress big brother,’ said Beanie, ‘and knowing that Gwyn’s got this thing about Dave the Turd, soon as he heard the name Gidman, he couldn’t wait to pass the info on to Gwyn.’

In fact there wasn’t all that much to pass on, and from what Beanie relayed to her, Maggie wasn’t any clearer why the possible resurfacing of an amnesiac cop should have got Gwyn Jones salivating. From Dave the Third’s reaction, she was pretty convinced the name Wolfe didn’t mean a lot to him either. She didn’t anticipate getting much more from Beanie Sample, but she was presently her only link to what was going on in Yorkshire. So when they got to Marina Tower, and the Bitch got out of the car still talking, Maggie followed her up to her apartment.

Inside, Beanie poured herself a large vodka and invited Maggie to help herself. She matched the size of Beanie’s drink but hers was mostly soda.

The Bitch went wandering off. Maggie followed her into a palatial bedroom.

She was noticing a change in the tone of Beanie’s complaint. The initial fury had died away and though the descriptive language used about Jones was just as colourful, the target area of complaint seemed to be shifting from his demeaning attempt at deception to the fact that he hadn’t shared a possible scoop with her.

‘Shit, I was breaking front-page stories before his balls had dropped,’ she declared. ‘I could have run things down here for him while he was pissing about up in Yorkshire. Cover your back, hon, that’s rule number one. No fucker’s a fucking island.’